That is indeed my point. I buy products, not gold. Some products contain gold, some used gold in the process but I do not need a 100 gram bar of gold.

In Holland at least, financial products must carry a legal disclaimer stating that past performance is no indication for the future.

What is this entire flawed study? Trying to predict the future, from past performance.

The Dutch economy is an open economy heavily dependent on the performance of the rest of the world. It doesn't much matter what our leaders do, the rest of the world dictates the state of the Dutch economy. So how do you compare its performance with the rest of world? It doesn't matter what our debt is, it matter how many products Germany ships through Rotterdam. But still, these economists try to compare how The Netherlands fared with X debt against the US which has a totally different economy. How different? The US is one of the bigger countries and is #1 in agri culture. The Netherlands is one of the smallest countries and is #2 in agri culture. Why? Every American black and white cow was created by a dutch boy sticking his arm up a cow. And jerking of a bull. The US exports low value agri cultural products, the Netherlands high value.

But it means the SAME industry, is COMPLETELY different. Baby cow production US style is cowboys and homo sexuality in the prairy. Dutch baby cow production is bestiality and high tech in the desolate north.

It is interesting to note that politicians who claim to want the best for big business are NEVER themselves successful big business owners AND that the successful big business owners never ever agree with them. Wallstreet likes the Republicans supposedly (but the two top financial newspapers advised voting against Romney because even a socialist in the white house would be better) but people like Warren Buffet and Richard Branson sing a very different tune. They think the best way to beat a recession is to spend. Not spend recklessly but invest in the future not in handing out tax cuts to buy votes.

Be wary of any leader who leads out of an ideology and not what is needed right now. Would you go to a doctor whose every answer is "lets amputate"? No? Then why vote for a politician whose every answer is "cut taxes, spend less, except on the pork project I need to get re-elected"? Real leadership is looking at what needs to be done and then do it. Not just have a one size fits all slogan.

When you zoom waaaaay in on Simcity, you see that the polygon count on the sims is just a tat higher then that in Bioshock.

In other words, I fucking hate the "art" direction that Bioshock always had. You may like, I don't and MANY seem to agree with me.

Critics don't make a product, buyers do. And Simcity being a flawed game? Gosh? Really? Well, that is a first. Lots of "can't do that" stuff once you get really stuck in? In a game? Wow! I never experienced that before.

Bioshock another FPS (even if decent, it is still in a long line of others) of which a dozen launch each month with art I don't like. Simcity a highly flawed Simcity game in a genre that sees a handful of titles per decade that are above abysmal.

Bioshock appeals to young kids with no money, Simcity appeals to adults for who 50 bucks for a game they might play for 50 hours is a very cheap form of entertainment.

It ain't "nice" but McD will always pull in more money by appealing to families with cheap burgers, then a quality burger joint aiming at hipsters. Know your market.

New York is very densely populated. It still doesn't have anywhere near close Asian speeds. Hell, Holland is LESS densely populated AND it has higher speeds. So does Sweden.

Not all of the US is a desolate wasteland inhabited by rednecks. Some parts are almost civilized, and still the infrastructure sucks donkey balls. Explain that?

It is isn't a pyramid scheme, it is just ruined by speculators. And the worst kind of speculators, the dumb kind that buys gold from vending machines because prices are at record heights.

If you know ANYTHING at all about successful speculation, you know that you buy LOW and sell HIGH. The dumb speculators are however slow as well as dumb and only dive on say speculating in gold when prices are already high. Buy Apple stock 10 years ago. Smart. Buying Apple stock right now. Dumb.

Bitcoin is seen as having a high value right now, like say comic books had a while ago and dumb people think that this is then worth investing in with the logic that if you buy high, you can sell at even HIGHER! And really cleanup!

It doesn't tend to work that way. Instead, you can buy high because smarter speculators are SELLING high and they are selling because they don't think it is going to go any higher. Bitcoin as a anonymous paypal alternative has some merrit. As an investment, not so much. As a currency, none whatsoever. It would be like creating a currency out of comic books or bottle caps.

Fallout fans may be familiar with that idea, it is silly but do you fully understand HOW silly it is? Bottle caps were garbage once. How can you put a real world value on an item someone may at any point find a whole stockpile off, or worse, the machines that make them in the millions? North Korea has its defacto currency, the US dollar. Even loyalty taxes to the state have to be paid in it. NK ALSO had projects to create huge piles of counterfeit US dollars. Some ended up in the rest of the world but the majority of counterfeit US dollars is in NK circulation. NK has flooded its own economy with counterfeit currency they can't even hope to spend anywhere because if you had any brains and a North Korean handed you a wad of dollars you check every note individually.

Almost anything can be used as a currency, and has. Stamps have been used as currency almost exactly as Terry Pratchett described it in one of his latest books. In fact, paper money is an alterntive not that different from bitcoin to using real precious metals as barter counters. Nobody has a need for gold however, it was just for thousand of years convenient to barter for goods with a in between mechanism of gold/silver. I trade you my chickens for X gram of precious metal I have no need off because I know that I can barter that for clothes with that other guy.

ANYTHING will do for that, and has. There have even been cases of shops creating their own low currency for giving chance to small for real currency. You give me your silver coin and I give you produce and a chit saying that you still have some spending power left in this shop.

But what you NEED for a currency to be usable is some stability. Deflation is bad because it causes people to hoard and to much inflation hurts as well because if you pay me now, I will have far less tomorrow. Rampant speculation causing a currency to go rise and fall thousands of percent are useless. How am I going to price my goods when every second the currency has a different value.

Say you are going to sell beer for REAL (and not just as a novelty value, bars can afford to "sell" some beer just for a smile if 99% of the customers buy it for hard cash) for 1 bitcoin you might get within a day get anywhere between a dollar and a 400 dollars.

There is a reason people talk about HARD cash. Hard cash needs to be hard, have a consitent value. Salt worked once because people had a stable need for salt, a stable market existed so it could be reliable used to barter with. Comic books, baseball card, tulip bulbs and bitcoins don't.

It makes no sense to invest in it, you can only speculate in it if you understand what buying low, selling high really means AND until the idiot speculation stops it is even useless as a paypal alternative because you can't mark your products in bitcoins when that goes up and down per minute.

What, like Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Look them up on google maps. Mad Max is a lie. The desolation, destruction and utter lack of humanity is just ordinary everyday Australia.

And you wouldn't need to nuke all of NK, just the capitol, kill the leadership and it is over. Koreans aren't muslims fanatics (Iraq/Afghanistan) or fighting the Xth foreign invader (Vietnam) they are closer to Germany and then the population in the concentration camps.

Well, yes, she did transform the UK economy. From an industrial nation to a bankers nation who then went bankrupt. The UK is Greece times a hundred with the Scots owing all the money (oil) and the UK being a shadow of a shadow of its former self. They even had to sell their aircraft carrier.

The UK is a great example of what happens when you are in love with the stock market and think bankers ARE the economy instead of being a support service for the economy.

Never mind that her party became under her leadership a byword for sleaze and corruption. Those in England have grown to despise her to such an extent even her own party banned her. She is basically a combo of Reagan and Nixon and NO Americans that is NOT a good thing.

Getting someone else's puzzle is HARD. For instance, in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father, one puzzle is to translate a piece of German text. I happen to be fluent enough in German to never think of looking for a dictionary in the game to find the answer to progress to the next bit.

It is the same reason stereo-types are so common in media, when you got a X amount of time to make something clear, you can't afford to leave any room for mis-interpretation. Mine was to forget Gabriel Knight is an American and as such mono-lingual.

The Secret World is a MMO by the maker of The Longest Journey and it has some puzzles in it... and boy was it "fun" to see anyone from PhD's to xbox owners tackle them. One tricky puzzle asked you to find a password with no more a clue then "Night Helen and I meter, under the fireworks set to my favorite composer." and "Music of the Seasons" that one right next to the computer you are trying to unlock. You would be surprised how many didn't get it.

Another hinted to look at the psalms for a keycode near a church. Is it THAT obscure that churches display psalms going to be sung at the next service somewhere? I am not even a Christian and I know that. Many many don't.

Adventures games are games from a time when you had to read books to learn things in an age when everything is a Google away. People have gotten lazy. I have gotten lazy. Throw six switches when I can throw 1? Throw 1 when I can throw 0?

Look at the latest Tomb Raider, pretty enough but the "hidden" dungeons couldn't be easier to find if they had flares next to them (instead of giant white graffiti) and consists of exactly ONE short puzzles doable in a few minutes. Compared to slowly making your way all around a gigantic underground pyramid, it just don't compare.

TSW was considered by many to be to hard... as an old fart, I can't be anything but be amazed by how mindless such people must be. But the simple fact is that the old Lucasarts and Sierra adventures were THEMSELVES, dumb downs of the text adventures.

I enjoyed the new Tomb Raider, I just wish it required me to actually think for a second at time instead of being a rather tiring roller coaster all the time. I wish TSW had more puzzles but spend more time playing Guild Wars 2 which is so fucking easy you have to do something else at the same time to avoid slipping into a coma.

Because while these new shallow games are much simpler, they are also far far smoother. No endless quest bugs in GW2, or none you mind anyway. The new Tomb Raider had me dropping to my death only a handfull of times and rarely required me retrying a jump several times to get it pixel perfect.

Old quality games required quality players and quality time and that is hard combo to get when you get old or have an xbox.

Star Wars: Battlefront was a cheap mod for another game.

The Jedi Knight games were made by another company.

Republic Commando was piss poor.

Tales of Monkey Island went downhill when it went 3D, the originals are older then ten years, the recent games were made by Telltale games.

Lego... you are aware that these were not original Lucasarts games either?

No wonder you post as an AC. I would cower to if I called these great lucasarts games.

Just Google Stunt Island, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunt_Island

That was Disney. They make more then shovel ware movie license games. Well, they used to. Same as Lucasarts really.

I am going to take business advice from a person who can't actually read and hasn't got a clue about the company he is talking about?

For your information, Lucasarts THRIVED when it developed games internally, it was when they outsourced development that the rot set in. So... the history of Lucasarts 100% invalidates your rant and proofs you are a silly person nobody should listen too.

You must be a Romney voter because logic just doesn't exist for you does it? It is generally accepted that first party titles for consoles are the must haves, the once of most reliable high quality.

You can spot the downfall of Lucasarts when during the opening graphics of X-Wing vs Tie-Fighter between the iconic logo's, there was a silly little bi-plane animation of a the 3rd party studio that got involved. And while the game offered some intresting new features, it just couldn't hold a candle to the solid quality of its ancestors. Some more disasters followed until the company was reduced to ordering totally unrelated companies to produce mods for other peoples games.

Inhouse = Solid quality and must buy titles each and everyone of them

Outsourced = meh

You might make fun of government employees, while you pay a fortune to save the privately run industries like the car and banking industries saying Romney was cheated because people like the editors of financial news papers just didn't get his policies and recommended right wingers vote for a left wing black guy.

Oh and to get back on topic, the only GOOD Disney game, was an inhouse title as well, Stunt Island. Google it, it was amazing for its time and is still unique.

In reality, in house means putting the interest of the company, YOUR company first and the intrests of your company are the customers. For 3rd party developers, the customer is the publisher NOT the plebs in the shops.

Just see what happened to Bioware when it stopped being a publisher and had to dance to EA's tune instead of listening to customers.

Hell, all the most respected studio's are those who develop their own games. Unreal, Id, Blizzard etc etc. It is the publishing houses and their slave companies that everyone looks down upon.

I am just reminded of some Antique Road Show kind of thing where a drug kit was presented, send to soldiers at some front by a loving family member, maybe WW1. Heavy drugs like cocaine and heroine weren't always illegal, heroine was marketted and created by Bayers, the Aspirin people. It was hailed as a miracle drug for being non-addictive... so much for medical testing eh?

The trick people forget is that drug abuse is NOT new, when people talk about the good old times, those times NEVER existed. And opium dens are the oldies equivalent of the crack house.

You can see the effects of unlimitted drug access quite easily. In smoking. When there were no warnings and restrictions, smoking was high. When they introduced warnings and restrictions, nicotine addicts dwindled. So... restrictin stuff works?

Well, yes and no. The point is that there is no perfect solution. Google the Opium Wars. China saw just what happened when you not just allow drugs but have the government make a profit out of pushing them. People are not all that good at managing their lifes. Yes, there are responsible drug users (how many people did YOU give cancer with your drug addiction Zero Kelvin?) but are YOU willing to pay for the irresponsible ones? Either directly in supporting them or indirectly in punishing them?

There is no perfect solution. That is the biggest hurdle to overcome in this debate, stopping any faction insisting that THEIR solution will solve ALL problems.

Saw the Surface at a large store yesterday. It was on the corner of a display stand. It was the smallest display area, of to the side of the "real" tablet area. Nobody was around it. Just a lonely little tablet for 500 euro's.

What Microsoft just never got because they are the bottom feeder is that people want something a bit special when they shell over cash. It is the reason why Starbuck can charge 2x as much for bad coffee as other stores AND have a longer line for it. Because when you go to Starbucks you don't buy coffee, you buy an experience. An experience of being served slightly better then at 99% of stores.

Apple has this experience. Microsoft doesn't. By definition it doesn't. People get hard/wet opening an Apple box. Nobody has to change their pants after a MS unboxing. Well, maybe accountants.

When you show off your device to others, you got have something to show off with. The first tablet, the high-rez tablet, the most cores, oled. SOMETHING. MS has NOTHING. Except a lame image and a high pricepoint. People didn't buy iPads because they were expensive bling, they paid a high price FOR the bling. It is a subtle different, it is the difference between a 1000 dollar mobile phone with specced out specs AND a 10.000 gold plated phone with mediocre specs.

Basically the Surface is the Zune all over again. Not because the Zune was objectively that bad but because it launched 2 years late with specs that belonged to 4 year old hardware. Not bad... but not good... and then there is that MS logo... it makes the people that hear "dude you got a dell" go "dude you got a ms".

There are just some companies that can't do sexy. Some companies go through the frontdoor of life and some companies are lucky to be allowed through the servant entrance, after dark.

Oh yes, the Americans showing of their typical military prowess... of bombing their ALLIES! Yes, good for you USA, you can bomb at will a FRIENDLY COUNTRY!

WTF? This is like showing how good a marksman you are in the trenches by shooting the guy next to you. That should scare the enemy? Maybe it the old Vietnamese idea, have the first row of your own soldiers cut their own head offs to show how though they are.

Show them just how crazy you are "we will kill ANYONE even ourselves!" and nobody will want to mess with you. (More likely reaction "good, fewer of them to fight" and how motivated are the guys in the second row going to be loyal now THEY are in the front row?)

And there is a serious note to this, during WW2 US bombers practiced over dry deserts and were amazed at how accurate they could bomb during day light hours. Then they were slaughtered over cloudy Europe bombing empty fields.

Nobody is impressed by a military exercise where it made clear to all that the blues are going to win this exercise.

If Gartner predicts it will be a success, it won't. They never ever been right on anything. You would think that even a broken clock is right twice a day but Gartners clock isn't.

And for all the 3D printing fans, right now there is a cheap home production system out there. It is called the sewing machine. It used to be common in every house because producing your own clothes was cheaper and you could make what you needed, when you needed it. Brilliant! There was an entire eco-system around it with fabric stores and even stores that sold nothing but buttons.

Do you own a sewing machine? No? Why not? Because it takes to much skill? Because it is cheaper to buy crappy fall apart stuff made in sweatshops around the world and marked up 1000%?

Well then what makes you think 3D printing will take off as a home production system? Yes yes, you can print your own gun... GUN. SINGLE. So you going to buy a 2000 dollar printer to print a 100 dollar gun... And if you really want to make your own gun, there are already plenty of metal working tools out there that can do it for you. You can already buy all the tools to build a gun. Even in countries with strict gun laws.

3D printing is an amazing invention and will completely change how things are prototyped or how unique items are created. BUT it is the sewing machine, hand sewing machines are STILL used by those prototyping clothing AND artists that want to make something unique. The rest of us buy our crap of the rack.

Same as I don't have a vegetable patch, don't grow my own herbs in a window box, don't make my own soap, don't gather my own firewood, don't cut my own bread, don't generate my own electricity, don't make own compost for plants, fix my own car, paint my apartment.

Hell, how many here even build their own PC anymore? And if you go "oh but that is way to complex and time consuming"

EX-FUCKING-ACTLY

I actually have used 3d printing services to create some cases for Arduino projects. I used a hobby club where a member helped me (well, did all the work for me really) and created some cases from scratch. Very nice, very useful but really, no different from me going to a tailor and asking for a suit to be made (which is not as expensive as people think it is). I don't have a sewing machine and I don't see a future of me owning a 3D printing machine. Why would I? I can pay someone to do it or me, and they can then afford a much better one then I can afford and we are all happy and laughing at Gartners made up statistics.