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Comment Re:What is Steam and why do we care? (Score 1, Informative) 313

Is it like iTunes for FPS games?

Pretty much, yes. Specifically games that people who are hard core into FPS consider to be "vintage" or "classic" - even though said games are many years younger than Wolfenstein, Doom, or even Quake. People who are big fans of it see it as a great gift to be able to buy Half-Life for $8 even though they bought it for $40 the first time, then bought the first special edition of it the year after for another $40, and the uber-mega-titanium-coated-diamond-edition of it the third year for another $60.

For the most part, it is a way for a company to extract a little more money from a large number of gamers who like to keep buying the same thing repeatedly.

And yes, I know I will be lucky to not be moderated down for this. Bombs away.

Comment Re:He planted it. (Score 1) 12

Being as even smitty knew I was making a joke, I think you would do well to follow your own advice. Really, I didn't expect to find someone else here on slashdot with whom I have more communication difficulties than smitty, but here you are.

Comment Re:Meh (Score 1) 7

For crying out loud in the dark, man, can't someone make a pure geek joke now and then?

I didn't realize that fashion critique now counts as geek humor.

Comment Re:He planted it. (Score 1) 12

Also, 9/11 "hijackers" also threw their wallets out the window just split second before hitting the WTC building 7. Oh, wait.

Do you mean they were on Mitt Romney aircraft? Holy shit, the conspiracy is deeper than we thought!

Comment Meh (Score 1) 7

Don't most people look like that after a long session with C++?

Beyond that though this kind of snarkiness towards a celebrity (who lacks a {D} after their name) is beneath you. Or are you saying he is some kind of stealth Obama donor - perhaps a union boss in disguise or something?

Comment Re:If it's any consolation... (Score 1) 7

...the regular use a browser on a computer web site is getting worse all the time as well.

Actually my experience - using Firefox in Linux - has not changed much in some time, and I am glad to say that. Indeed it generally does tend to only get worse around here but it has been quite some time since I noticed any changes.

I will say that when I used konqueror I found that even very simple tasks like changing my account settings could have catastrophic results leading to browser crash.

Comment Re:Charging authors is not much better... (Score 4, Informative) 61

Charging authors to publish is not much better than charging people to read the articles

Every journal I am aware of that uses any kind of peer review process does this. This system, however, is a lot cheaper. I recently publised in PLoS ONE and I had to pay around $1,500 for that. I really hope these guys can keep their publication costs down and manage to acquire some prestige so they get indexed in relevant places.

What we truly need is a system that is paid for by universities, cooperatively, that allows anyone to submit a paper and allows anyone to download as many or as few papers as they would like.

Some journals have tried that - look at the institutional memberships at PLoS (my institution is not a member) and BioMedCentral for example - the problem with that though is that memberships like that would usually be paid for by the school libraries and quite nearly every school in this country is trying to reduce their library expenditures.

Comment Re:He's not quite so level-headed (Score 1) 19

Agreed, gun safes and trigger locks should be mandatory.

Indeed, although enforcement is pretty well impossible. The best way to encourage responsible gun ownership is to truly throw the book at hacks who are careless with their weapons.

If someone breaks into your house, steals your gun safe, takes it home and rips it to shreds with a torch to get out your gun and then goes out and kills someone with it, you couldn't have reasonably done more and the person who stole it should be solely responsible. However if you leave your loaded gun on the kitchen table and someone picks it up and fires off a round it should be treated as if the gun was in your own hand.

I know that there are plenty of responsible gun owners in this country who do not aspire to be murderers. They keep their guns locked away when they are not shooting them and they should not be punished for being responsible. However there are unfortunately far too many irresponsible owners who through laziness, stupidity, or whatever else, end up catalyzing injuries and death. The latter group deserves to go to jail when their mismanaged weapons become instruments of injury and death in any hand.

Comment Re:I don't know about slashcode (Score 1) 7

Odd that you mention slashcode. I remember someone else brought it up in a discussion I was in a few weeks back, and I pointed out that the latest slashcode is at least three years old

. Hell, not only is it old but the last comment on it was from a friend of yours who has not worked for slashdot for some time.

While I for one don't really care if they ever release a newer version of it, I do think it would be interesting to know how much of the available slashcode is still used to run this site.

Comment Re:It must be time for a new non-troversy by now (Score 1) 16

Do you find erotic relief in the word 'impeachment'?

No, I just thought I'd see what your latest favorite conspiracy theory was. Even if I used it in every conversation I have with you between now and the end of time I still wouldn't be able to raise it as many times against Obama as you have.

That said I am impressed that you are still beating this dead horsefly. I really expected you would have abandoned it before now and moved on to some other fabulous allegation you could provide no factual support to.

Asking for a friend.

Sure. Sure, you are.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Slashdot's "new" mobile site also sucks epically 7

A week or so ago there was a front page story here bragging about the "new" mobile site on slashdot. I was interested to see this as before they had pretty well abandoned development for mobile devices. I know of their abandonment based on a time when I wrote former site manager Rob Malda and he told me that they would not be developing for mobile devices.

Comment Re:Can you replace your whole system for that pric (Score 1) 380

From reading the article it seems the poster's son is interested in stuff like this and likes running a Minecraft - server, so it would be a hobby for him and therefore any time spent on recovering from losses would still be within the limits of an educational hobby.

Sure, but what is not clear is how much of the poster's time would be consumed by this. Is the son capable of managing this on his own (the abstract suggests the answer may be no)? If the dad has to put time into this then you need to estimate what his time is worth - in particular the opportunity cost of him not being available to do other fatherly stuff.

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