(spoilers, if you've never read Asimov)

Unlike the horrible movie, the book "I, Robot" was a series of short stories dealing with the ambiguity of the laws. (The movie was more some bizarre combination of "free the robots!" mixed with "the three laws are a lie".) Additionally, the ambiguity of the laws came up multiple times in the Robot/Foundation universe, such as in "The Naked Sun" and "The Robots of Dawn."

The laws are paradoxically hard-and-fast yet ambiguous. In any case where any law is essentially violated (using one of the workarounds), the robots "go crazy" or die. This applies to the Zeroth Law; witness the end of Giskard due to the mere inability to determine if an action was harmful or not.

In the end, it's something like a moral version of the Halting Problem. Even if you can define "harm" to the satisfaction of everyone, you can't determine if something ultimately leads to harm or not.

Doom3 may have these things, but they don't make it any more scary. It's still bland, boring, and unimaginative. The discussion was about "terrifying," which it isn't, not "is it a FPS" or "does it have certain gameplay elements".

There are better FPS's. There are better Horror FPS's. Some of these are even actually scary. For instance, Amnesia. Doom 3 is just bad.

That said, the Doom3 engine may not be bad, and hey, it's GPL'd now, so you can even go fix it if it is. This is entirely orthogonal to Doom3 the game. But now you have a (probably good, mature, stable) 3D engine that can output to the Oculus Rift, and it's Free(tm).

I found it terrifying.

I have not played "BFG Edition," so perhaps this is the version where they entirely remade it into something actually scary by dumping everything from the original and remaking it from the ground up. Otherwise, the only "terrifying" it was was terrifyingly bad.

I mean by this point "space marines go to hell" isn't exactly surprising or a spoiler like it was with the original, so most of the game comes down to flashing lights and generic monsters predictably jumping out of things. This isn't scary. This doesn't even make you jump in your seat, unless maybe it's your first game of this variety.

(Even the original wasn't really scary per se, but it did build the "wtf" factor and provided a lot more interesting levels and atmosphere IMO .. but they weren't constrained nearly as much by "realism".)

But if you think this game is scary, you should play more actually scary games. Silent Hill 2, Fatal Frame, Lone Survivor, or plenty of others. Games that actually have you worried when you get up to open a door. Games that don't "scare" you by having things jump out of the closet, but scare you when something isn't there, that have you questioning what actually just happened.

I can understand not liking it, but there are a lot worse games out there.

This may be technically true, but Doom 3 isn't even good enough to waste your time playing it when there are far better games out there. A waste of a waste of time!

And, failing that, if they just got some reasonable and non-discriminatory patent licensing terms, there's a few million dollars lying about that they could have a chunk of just by NOT suing.

A few million dollars is nothing .. a fraction, even less. I'm guessing these guys would be happy to spend a few million dollars stifling any competition and clutching on to their dying monopoly for just a bit longer.

Agreed.. the Vita has breathed new life into a number of games that were painful to play at best... and they have just about all the useful second-stick mappings now. There are still a few odd/impossible things (button+stick) that won't be possible to fix, but hey, 3rd Birthday is a real shooter now, and Monster Hunter no longer requires The Claw to play!

I know this is a poor analogy because of all the variables, but to emulate PS2 you need a very hefty PC with a real GPU. Something far beyond the power of a PS3.

Utterly irrelevant. A PS2 uses an unusual proprietary architecture and games tend to take advantage of very low-level architecture-specific tweaks. A PSP is a pretty standard MIPS R4000 and a fairly crappy but fairly standard GPU. With high-level emulation, dyamic recompilation, etc, it shouldn't be hard to emulate even on modest hardware. With today's GHz+ CPUs in phones, brute forcing may even be a reasonable option.

[...] lets you play PSP Games with a touchscreen which was something PSP owners had wanted for years.

I've never heard anyone want this. Is this anything like all the people who wanted a non-UMD version of the PSP, and eventually got it in the PSPgo, which promptly fell flat on its face due to lack of actual interest?

Of course, I can always imagine an emulator being popular, if it plays copies of games (regardless of whether you consider this OK or not).

Same thing. The point is that they'd colonized the galaxy (one of the faulty assumptions), and we'd see them, or evidence thereof, and we don't, for any of the given reasons.

Otherwise you'll have to come up with a really good reason why we wouldn't be asking or questioning their clear existence despite a lack of any observation or evidence.

The Fermi Paradox assumes quite a few things which may not be true, such as interstellar travel being practical or desirable, life and intelligence being similar to our own, the fact we could actually spot it with our current techology (or that it would desire to be seen), and that artifacts of past civilizations would actually last for the millions of years between said civilization and our own.

We are barely able to start seeing extrasolar planets. The idea that "if it's out there, we would have seen it" seems a bit silly for any number of reasons. For instance, noticing, here on earth, the tiny blip in time a civilization that might use radio waves seems unlikely. People who subscribe to the technological singularity might assume that any civilization with high enough technology would be incomprehensible to us; think of us trying to tune into a radio show (or look for smoke signals) when they're using the internet. I think the article above lists a few more.

Star Trek may well not be possible as you say; that doesn't mean something better isn't.

Apple chose to use the "nuclear option," and have no-one to blame but themselves. These things are typically settled reasonably ... compare patent stacks, few pennies go to the one with the taller stack. But no, Apple has shown they don't play nice. Everyone with any sense will be hostile toward Apple. Prisoner's Dilemma, basically, except everyone knows ahead of time that Apple defects.

Apple can't win this way in the long run. They may have a big pile of cash, but if everything they want to do suddenly gets nickel-and-dimed, they'll find that only goes so far.

The controller raises a lot of interesting possibilities

Just like the Wii! And the GameCube! And the N64! Yet, somehow, none of these "interesting possbilities" ever seem to pan out into a large library of games.

But I haven't been hearing a lot of buzz about it, considering it's supposed to be launching next month. I know it's supposed to be as powerful as the PS3/360.

Wow, it's just as powerful as the consoles I've had for the last 5 years. And it's going to cost more than they have in a long time. And guess what! Instead of one of those puny 500GB PS3-with-a-game bundles, we're going to get a whole 32GB flash, and a piece of crap. Yawn. They could try a lot harder.

But I haven't heard much about the debut game lineup.

Then you haven't been paying attention. It's going to have some games at launch: a lot of non-exclusives with a few bizarre exclusives (Bayonetta 2?) and yet more rehashing of old Nintendo franchises.

Frankly I think Nintendo, for all their faults (most notably, their admittedly piss-poor online support), kind of gets the short-shrift in the gaming community. Their systems may not have the cutting edge CPU's and GPU's, but they do what they do pretty well.

This is utter BS and I'll tell you why Nintendo is getting well-deserved apathy: games. The NES and SNES had amazing lineups of games that are still playable today. The N64 started a long line of bad decisions for Nintendo: tiny cartridges; it had Mario64 and Zelda64 that were genre-defining games, but little else that stands up. The GameCube had slightly more, but due to tiny disc size and bizarrely-different controller, the lineup wasn't huge. Still, I'd take it over the Wii, which has nothing defining, lots of rehashing (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, few of them any good), and the occasionally good third-party title Nintendo refuses to import (Xenoblade).

It's not (just) because Nintendo panned the community by repeatedly insulting the "hard-core" constituents, it's a continuing downward spiral of crap gaming library. Granted, this hasn't been the last-last generation where I packed six shelves with just the good PS2 games, but the PS3 has a solid three shelves, and the 360 has a good two shelves, and I don't give a crap where any of the Wii games are.

Now I should be excited about the Wii U, which is just now playing catchup with last gen and getting lots of ports? Sony is already pushing to have the Vita and PS3 interact to kill whatever "interesting possbilities" the WiiU wants to hold exclusive. Love or hate Sony, they can build a platform that has a game library worth playing. If Microsoft does something similar with smartphones or the Surface, say bye to any interest in the Wii U from anyone.

possesive

"Possessive," but then, Muphry's Law.

The problem, obviously, is that they need extra capacity for peak hours, plus bandwidth costs, plus tons of data centers to minimize latency, all of which results in massive overhead.

That's the point. You can't get away with paying for minimum capacity, so you have to always pay for maximum capacity. I've heard they cut corners and not all games got premium hardware, but that just brings down the average price. What happens when the majority of your player base wants to play the latest new thing?

Someone with existing cloud services might be able to pull this off, as well, if they charged hourly for usage and bandwidth. At least then they could repurpose the capacity when it's not in use. That said the pricing might not be so attractive, and without lots of specialized hardware it's probably not possible to achieve sufficiently-low latency.

They may have even discovered that gamers don't tolerate an internet connection level of input delay in their games!

Eh. I tried OnLive to see how well they accomplished what they did. Latency wasn't the main concern, but then I have a reasonable connection (~25Mbps) and may be geographically near one of their data centers. The main problems are more the following:

• The rendering quality was often crap; this may be a function of the encoding, but it doesn't matter. Washed-out colors, blurry video, and heavy artifacting don't make a great experience.
• Price model. This was too good to be true. Pay for the game or like $10/mo for their PlayPack stuff. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they can provide sufficient rendering at $700 a box on average for any given game. They need one rendering unit for every player. They need to pay for bandwidth and energy to run all these units, plus people to maintain them. They need to stay upgraded, generously, every year or two, to play the latest stuff. That's quite a bit of money to support a single user paying $120/year.
• Casual/hardcore disconnect. Is this for casual gamers who don't want to pay for a gaming PC? Or hardcore gamers who want to play all the latest stuff? A casual gamer can likely find plenty to play on their phone or the web; a hardcore gamer isn't going to be satisfied with the limitations. There may be a niche, but it doesn't seem big enough to support the model.

In the end this always seems to fail at a financial level: if it's cheap enough per-player that a $10/mo fee can cover licensing, hardware, and utility, then it's probably cheap enough the user is going to have his or her own device (e.g., a smartphone). If not, then it's not going to work anyway.

And it's not a matter of volume. Nintendo, Sony, and MS have volume on their consoles, and they still sell for $200+, often at a loss, and the only maintenance cost is warranty support. Making up for this on licensing isn't an option for OnLive, since they don't make any games. There are no exclusives.

The only way this might work (financially, at least) is a subsidized hardware console with a reasonable contracted subscription fee, and first-party game support as well as third-party exclusives. Gamestop might be trying this, but it's unclear if they're actually funding games or just providing a similar service.

Top of article:

McAfee says that the malware family makes up more than 60 percent of Android samples the company processes.

End of article:

If you want to significantly reduce your chance of getting malware such as this one, only install apps from the official Google Play store. That being said, malware has snuck into the store before, so it can happen again.

So in essence this article is a nearly-worthless scare piece. Unless you're downloading "pirated" versions of (presumably) commercial apps from a shady source, this article isn't relevant. But then, it's a McAfee article, so surprise.