Are you deliberately ignoring the "A man chooses, a slave obeys" scene or did you just not play that far into the game? It was pretty much the whole point of the narrative that the choices you can make are limited and cannot actually affect the game. Which makes the player actually empathise with their character for once, which is what makes Bioshock a masterpiece. Well, that and the incredibly immersive environment, fun gameplay and beautiful art.

Generic FPS, slightly-outdated graphics, potentially-fun gravity gimmick, not much else going for it... hrmmm, where have we seen this before?

Then again, iD tends to make good games so maybe it'll be good this time around.

But then you have masterpieces like Bioshock which centres its narrative around that very phenomenon, and still gives you some freedom of choice to affect the outcome of the story.

And then you have games like Fallout 3 which give you a rich, detailed environment and let you run wild in it, giving you the freedom to make choices which affect your entire world as you continue to play.

Yes there are a lot of games with simple, linear storytelling but that is a limitation imposed by the writers/developers - NOT the medium. And games can be a very powerful medium for linear storytelling too even if the majority (just like most of what airs on TV) is trash, or simply exists to be fun without telling a story or emotionally involving the player.

Several similarly silly schemes actually exist (see the OFF System, and lawyers tend to be unimpressed - they all amount to encrypting the communication and/or obfuscating what you're transferring. So if what you're transferring is copyrighted, you're still infringing on that copyright.

See What Colour are your bits?.

Except google apps "Standard edition" is free. And it's pretty much all you'd need unless you're a largish business. Pretty much the only difference is you get a mere 5GB (of which I'm using something like 200MB) instead of 25GB per mailbox, a limit of something like 50 users, and you don't get their mobile access and migration tools. You get SMTP/IMAP/POP and the best webmail interface there is :)

/usr/local/* is for you stuff you've installed manually. /usr/bin is a perfectly sensible place for a package manager to put executables it installs. The package manager shouldn't fuck with anything in /usr/local.

Racedriver: GRID. It's a high-quality production and manages to get the balance between fun and realism spot on. I really hope they make a Need for Speed clone, because they could really eat EA's lunch there.

I dunno about blend but if you have a look at the 18th picture, the card just above the PSU sure can bend - disconcertingly so! I would've thought they'd take more care than that on a $16,000 system.

Reminds me of the Big Ideas (don't get any) remix of Radiohead's "Nude".

Thoroughly worth watching, but feel free to skip to the beginning of the music at about 1:10.

Because sometimes you don't have anything useful to add. If you did, you wouldn't be modding to start with.

Ironically, further down I have a post modded to +4 so I guess your point is valid.

You're thinking of MP3's joint-stereo messing up Dolby Pro Logic (as described here). Not really important to me, I recently ditched my 5.1 setup for a nice pair of stereo speakers.

No, I can't hear the difference. I can't even hear the difference between FLAC and 128kbps MP3s from a modern encoder on most samples.

But I might want to transcode to a lower bitrate for a portable or network player. Or maybe I want to use some funky DSP which has the unfortunate side effect of showing up MP3 artifacts. Who cares? Disk space and bandwidth is just SO FUCKING CHEAP why would you want anything but lossless when it's so damn easy? Sending the actual data is probably the smallest cost of selling music online, so why is it even an issue? Lossless just seems like a no-brainer to me.

I wish everyone did this. Even if I didn't like the music I would've bought Ghosts anyway just to support people selling music in good format.

Replying to undo mis-clicked mod. Meant to click "Informative".

Really? I thought it was more like:

Rambus makes RAM.

Rambus has some patents on some RAM technology, and got this technology included into various standards - without telling anyone that they held the patents.

When everyone started making RAM to meet said standards, Rambus suddenly started asking for royalties on the patents that they hadn't mentioned earlier.

Everyone else got pissed off by this and got the FTC to agree that that's not cricket, but the courts apparently don't agree with the FTC.

The lawyers have been slapping their cocks together for about 17 years, several of which have been in relation to this case.

There were decisions, there were appeals, and now the end of it is the Supreme Court ruling that lets Rambus get away free and clear.

He accidentally the whole printed programming.