I notice you still can't control where your character moves in Star Wars. He follows a pre-defined path, and you just swipe at enemies as you approach them. What I'd really like to see is Kinect + some sort of hand-held controller for moving around. Then you'd have a truly immersive experience; ducking to avoid fire, using your body for emotes, crouching with a sniper rifle, throwing a grenade...

I can't believe no-one's done it yet.

I strongly suspect that projects like interstellar colonization and Dyson spheres are theoretically possible, but that so far no intelligent species has ever managed it. It seems the simplest explanation by far. My theory is that advanced civilizations only last for a few centuries before they run out of metals. Or at least, that this is what will happen here on earth. See what you think: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3451

It's possible that the answer to Fermi's Paradox is a depressing one...

What if FTL communication doesn't exist?

For me it's never been about pushing graphics to the limit, it's about the input. Playing an FPS with a mouse and keyboard is just vastly superior to doing the same with thumb-controlled joysticks.

On the other hand, if you put a mouse and keyboard on a console, you have something that looks an awful lot like a PC with limited software compatibility.

Heh, they fell right into your little trap. If they reply to you, they can't mod you anymore.

That's supposedly been the case for at least a decade, and yet US oil production doesn't appear to exactly be in a massive imploding crisis of supply. In 2007 the US produced 8.5 million barrels/day

Here's what the United States Department of Energy has to say: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Oil_Production_and_Imports_1920_to_2005.png It shows US production at 5 million barrels/day in 2005, down from 9.5 million in 1970. The CIA world fact book shows current US production at 9 million barrels/day - a pretty large discrepancy. I wonder if they're using some kind of different barrel size.

The start menu had horizontal scrolling. Is that still the case?

If your results are different because you had a small sample size, then they DID come about by chance. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_power Some excerpts:

Power analysis can be used to calculate the minimum sample size required to accept the outcome of a statistical test with a particular level of confidence. It can also be used to calculate the minimum effect size that is likely to be detected in a study using a given sample size.

For example, if we were expecting a population correlation between intelligence and job performance of around .50, a sample size of 20 will give us approximately 80% power (alpha = .05, two-tail) to reject the null hypothesis of zero correlation. However, in doing this study we are probably more interested in knowing whether the correlation is .30 or .60 or .50. In this context we would need a much larger sample size in order to reduce the confidence interval of our estimate to a range that is acceptable for our purposes.

I normally don't respond to trolls, but I'm tired of seeing this particular complaint on slashdot. We CAN tell when we have enough participants, without having to test more than a tiny fraction of the population.

"It does appear that the buildings in New York collapsed essentially because of a controlled demolition, which employed explosives as well as certain incendiary substances found in the rubble."

-William Blum

If the test showed statistical significance, it won't matter if they increase the sample size, the results will be the same.That's what statistical significance is FOR. Besides, this effect is well known in the field of human memory. The longer your brain focuses on something, the better you'll remember it.

In a video game, packets are usually only dropped due to interference on the line - the game itself sends at a fixed rate, which is normally well below what a broadband connection provides. The congestion control never kicks in.

Solutions which require the internet's infrastructure to be replaced (all the routers and switches and so forth) have been proposed for many years, and never go anywhere. The only one I'm aware of is IPv6, and look how slowly that beast has taken off. That said, TCP sawtooth isn't as bad as you make it out to be - in most cases. Whenever a packet is dropped, the TCP connection drops its speed to around half, then gradually ramps up to where it was previously. You don't get 100% of your bandwidth utilization, but you do get to automatically adjust to changing network conditions. And as the number of TCP connections over one pipe increases, you get closer and closer to max utilization rates.

TCP fails when:
-competing against UDP, which has no congestion control and will clog a line even if every UDP packet is dropped
-there is interference in the line causing packet corruption, which TCP interprets as congestion
-competing against Microsoft products, which have TCP stacks that are tweaked to grab more than their fair share of the bandwidth

My understanding is that TCP congestion control generally isn't applied to backbones - I believe that ISPs throttle your traffic before sending it over an optic link so as not to overbook its capacity. You're probably just competing with your household, and possibly people on your block - can someone verify this?

Google ebookstore. http://books.google.com/ebooks

The books are in an open format that can be read by multiple devices. (Not the Kindle though!)

Or that interstellar travel is so difficult that it's been infeasible for every intelligent species that has ever evolved.

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