It's particularly curious when you consider that the US constitution also includes robust speech protections, so it isn't as though this is a 'Well, one is constitutionally protected and the other isn't, our hands are tied here' thing The speech protections don't even include that cryptic stuff about well regulated militias.
Comrade, the people that the army kills are not real people.
Ah, but the AR-15 was developed by a guy named 'Stoner'. Coincidence, or evidence of the secret violence behind the hippy agenda?
American politicians are too afraid of the NRA nutters to ban real guns. So they want to ban toys.
The NRA has been doing their part to focus attention on the attention in that direction. As saith Wayne LaPierre himself:
"And here's another dirty little truth that the media try their best to conceal: There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people. Through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse. And here’s one: it’s called Kindergarten Killers. It’s been online for 10 years. How come my research department could find it and all of yours either couldn’t or didn’t want anyone to know you had found it?"
(Incidentally, why is it that people who hate video games apparently only revise their lists of horrifying games every 5-10 years? If you are going for 'timeless classics' where the fuck are 'Doom' and 'Postal'. If you are going for relevant, how about a few of the big console shooters that actually have major audiences? C'mon, guys...)
Because(in most product line ups) the one that has 80-90% of the performance, and often fewer warts, since it's a mass-market product, costs half as much.
Obviously, I'm fine with people buying whatever amuses them. If that's your hobby, rock on. It's still the case that bang-for-buck generally goes to hell at the very top end.
Since we're good at picking up motion in peripheral vision that's probably a lot harder to do effectivly than full screen rendering.
I imagine that the real trick would be in keeping the eye from perceiving the quality drop-off as movement. You certainly wouldn't need maximum texture quality or fancy bump-mapping or whatnot to fool peripheral vision; but a sensation that 'everything moves the moment I take my eyes off it' would be damn annoying...
One of the early iDevice jailbreaks was also done with a malformed
It's abortions and stronger morals that have allowed this reduction in violence.
How exactly does one measure the strength of morals at a population level?
I wonder what kind of yields Nvidia is getting... 3 times as many transistors as one of Intel's fancy parts, and on a slightly larger process(28 vs. 22nm) that's a serious slice of die right there.
On the plus side, I image that defects in many areas of the chip would only hit one of the identical stream processors, which can then just be lasered out and discounted slightly, rather than something critical to the entire chip working. That probably helps.
Hmm. $999 (2013) for 4.5 TF/s vs. $15 million (1984) for 400 MF/s from Cray-XMP. Hard to believe.
This is why I've stopped buying hardware altogether and am simply saving up for a time machine... Importing technology from the future is, by far, the most economically sensible decision one can make.
All games that have the budget for graphics these days are targeted at console limitations. I can't really see any reason to spend that much on a graphics card, except if you're a game developer yourself.
Buying the absolute-top-of-range card(or CPU) almost never makes any sense, just because such parts are always 'soak-the-enthusiasts' collectors items; but GPUs are actually one area where (while optional; because console specs haven't budged in years) you actually can get better results by throwing more power at the problem on all but the shittiest ports:
First, resolution: 'console' means 1920x1080, maximum, possibly less'. If you are in the market for a $250+ graphics card, you may also own a nicer monitor, or two or three running in whatever your vendor calls their 'unified' mode. A 2550x1440 is pretty affordable by the standards of enthusiast gear. That is substantially more pixels pushed.
(Again, all but the shittiest ports) you usually also have the option to monkey with draw-distance, Anti-aliasing, and sometimes various other detail levels, particle effects, etc. Because consoles provide such a relatively low floor, even cheap PC graphics will meet minimum specs, and possibly even look good doing it; but if the game allows you to tweak things like that(even in an
It is undeniable that there are some truly dire console ports out there, that seem hellbent on actively failing to make use of even basic things like 'a keyboard with more than a dozen buttons'; but graphics are probably the most flexible variable. It is quite unlikely(and would require considerable developer effort) for a game that can only handle X NPCs in the same cell as the player on the PS3 to be substantially modified for the PC release that has access to four times the RAM or enough CPU cores to handle the AI scripts or something. That would require having the gameplay guys essentially designing and testing parallel versions of substantial portions of the gameplay assets, and potentially even require re-balancing skill trees and things between platforms.
In the realm of pure graphics, though, only the brittlest 3d engines freak out horribly at changing viewport resolutions or draw distances, so there can be a reward for considerably greater power(for some games, there's also the matter of mods: Skyrim, say, throws enough state around that the PS3 teeters on the brink of falling over at any moment. However, on a sufficiently punchy PC, the actual game engine doesn't start running into (more serious than usual) stability problems until you throw substantially more cluttered gameworld at it.
Our government works for us, not the corporations who want to turn our private lives into profit.
HADOPI? It is undeniably true that France has a distinct distaste for data-hoovering American internet companies(how much out of a genuine commitment to privacy law, and how much out of an ongoing jealous spat over the surprising lack of data-hoovering French internet companies is somewhat unclear); but damn are they ever 'helpful' when it comes to protecting those culturally-vital copyright holders...
Since the Ubuntu tablet will not have 'keys' in a physical sense; being a largely featureless slab of glass on the front just like everything else on the market, Canonical is pleased and proud to announce that 'keystrokes' will not be transmitted directly to valued advertising partners!
At a facility whose first stage was opened in 2007? They were going to start on the timetable you suggested; but they couldn't find enough researchers with 10 or more years experience working at the UK national synchrontron facility...
AIDS(which, while nasty, is pretty stubbornly fluid-borne) shares a containment level with the flu(which, while merely annoying, cuts a broad and temporary swath through the population pretty much every time somebody gets the winter sniffles)? Are 'containment levels' based much less on ease of transmission than the name would suggest?
If all else fails, lower your standards.
