Too bad it isn't quite strong enough to generate 1.21 Gigawatts though. Looks like we still gotta hit the DeLorean with lighting bolts. :(

I much prefer the Oblivion style of fighting than the Morrowind and earlier style. Specifically in Morrowind, it just felt stupid the way combat worked. I remember starting a Wood Elf, got a dagger from the port that you start in, going into some cave, finding 3 rats in the cave, SWINGING WILDLY AT THE RATS, and dying.

Why? Because the game decided that, despite me witnessing the blade go through the rats' head several times, I missed the rat. That's just idiotic. It made some amount of sense when all enemies were actually 2D sprites that sat in front of you as they did in Arena and Daggerfall because you can't really judge distance to such objects. In modern full 3D RPG engines though, that system is just horrible and I'm glad to see it go away. Skill in combat skills such as archery or blade should determine how much damage you can inflict, how often special side-effects of attacking occur, such as disarm or knock-downs. That's what they do in Oblivion. It should NOT be "Did I actually hit him?" as they do in Morrowind, Daggerfall and Arena. If my arrow lands into his head, with the arrow basically entering one side and being almost visible on the other side, it doesn't make sense to answer that question with a definitive "No, good sir. That arrow did not hit."

RIght, but even still, you are proving his/her point: Some weapons are just clearly better.

We have always known Backburner to be inferior to Flamethrower (less-so since they added airblast to the backburner). Well, not always... When it first released it was basically better than the Flamethrower in every way, but then became inferior with airblast changes.

Valve is not good at balance at all. Many weapons when they are added break gameplay for quite a while until they are patched. Backburner being one that has changed many times in its history, going from powerful, to inferior in every way, to finally being usable, but still not Pyro's best weapon.

Heavy's Fists of Steel, for example, when they first came out, you could basically just walk to the point with your medic like a boss and not even a demoman with crit stickies on the point could do much to stop you. Not even have to fire a single shot. You would survive in many cases, and be able to cap the point. Changed that item an update or two later.

When Demo's targe came out, same idea. It's defensive buffs were insane, and a rocket could unload up to 8 clips on a demo with targe and not even dent him. While, obviously, the solution is to use bullet weapons like shotgun, that doesn't always work from certain distances. They reduced the defensive properties of that weapon as well.

Sandman used to be able to paralyze anyone at any range (god, those were good times). You could even paralyze ubers. So consider this: 2fort. Engineers camping the courtyard, so you get ready for an uber push. You can only uber-push from the sink room, or the 2nd spawn drop hall. You pop the uber. Scout camping their own base with sandman. Fires baseball at the uber heavy. Runs to resupply. Fires another at the still paralyzed heavy. Fires another... Repeat. Heavy is dead. They have since then, changed it so sandman only slows down targets hit by the ball, and can only paralyze targets from very far away. Furthermore, the sandman's ball cannot affect ubers at all.

The list goes on. They aren't good at balance in any way at all and are constantly overpowering items, or in some cases, such as the new sniper rifle, under-powering them in fear of over-powering them and making them pointless in comparison to other weapons.

Money Apple makes from their app store transactions and advertising deals subsidizes any kind of loss of profit they may endure (nevertheless, they probably still over charge for iPad vs parts and labor, just less so than the others).

Compare their model to the Android Marketplace, where profits don't go to Samsung, Motorola or any of the companies actually making compatible devices, rather, those profits go to Google. In order to gain, they simply have little choice but to charge more for the device.

Android devices like Nook don't have this issue, and are able to sell cheap, because they don't use the Android Marketplace, rather, they have their own ways of subsidizing the hardware costs. Even Kindle, albeit not an Android device or considered a tablet PC, benefits from Amazon's entire library of books. Amazon could practically give Kindles away for free and still make a reasonable profit as you will want to load the device with books, and they happen to sell them cheap.

Yes there was editing... To make the video shorter. There's certainly no reason to assume there was any editing other than that. By all means though, repeating his experiment at home is not difficult, provided you have the installers for all of it.

Terms and Conditions I certainly never signed prior to using Google's services. Terms and Conditions a Bing toolbar user never had to sign and probably isn't even aware he/she is violating by using Google's services and having certain features of the toolbar enabled. Terms and Conditions Microsoft never had to sign.

Even if we buy Google's spin, or at least Google fanboy spin, that Microsoft is literally stealing the search queries and assigning the Google result to be the top result of Bing, I don't see how Microsoft is in any legal trouble. If EULAs that people actually have to agree to in order to install software have questionable legality, certainly one they don't bother to present to you and don't have you sign are even more questionable. Does the EULA of Google's somehow carry more weight than other companies' EULAs just because they have a slogan about not doing evil?

Of course, Microsoft isn't (or at least hasn't been proven to be) even doing that. The information they are using comes from user browsing information, which happens to include Google results among other things.

He doesn't. He is publishing information to the public. This is like complaining that your facebook page is public. If you don't want it public, don't broadcast it to everyone, or in this case, require people to sign up for your search service.

We don't know that. Google didn't prove that the value of Google's answer outweighs all other sources of information Bing uses to rank pages. These terms that Google invented basically didn't exist. The weighting of the user obtained input from the toolbar could represent millionth of a percent as far as we know. Having a "rank" of .0000001 is better than 0. That's a far cry from automatically setting google's result to the top result. They only showed that Microsoft uses toolbar data, perhaps or perhaps not with other things, in page ranking. For terms unknown to Bing, it results in Google's result being the top result. They proved nothing else.

I don't think they are talking about a screen, though I could be wrong. I think they are talking about a touchpad, similar to the one on your everyday laptop. When you hold the device, your fingers will naturally reach around to touch it. It is likely back there to allow a more natural control of the system, attempting to correct complaints people had with the PSP's stick.

That's what I speculate at least. I'm not much a follower of Sony.

Important thing they didn't announce is a lack of 3D technology, either glasses or glasses-free. Unless this thing has something more clever than the existing technology Nintendo already has in their soon to be last generation Nintendo DS, I don't see NGP really harming Nintendo's position much at all.

The war would have played out differently had the US and European allies not been present though.

I hate seeing this argument and not seeing at least a little further attempt at critical thinking. What is lost in numbers is the fact that because Operation Overlord was mostly fought in the West/South and the Russian campaign fought in the North/East, Germany had two complete fronts to fight. Pretending for a second that Germany and Italy decide to not fulfill their side of the defensive pact with Japan after Japan attacks the United States, and neither Germany nor Italy of them declare war on the US, this would mean Germany would only really be fighting one major front in Europe. Germany would have continued to win Africa and the Middle East, and all the resources those areas hold, and only be fighting Russians and small resistance from Britain. Germany very well could have won the war with the Soviets had the United States not assisted them in the European and African fronts because Soviets lacked resources of their own to win it. As someone stated earlier, as it was, most steel used by the Soviets during the war was from the United States.

Same can be said if, somehow, the Soviets never entered the war. It's likely that the Germans could have redistributed their forces to better protect African and Middle-eastern expansions. Those expansions and the oil, raw materials, etc. that came with it would have aided them in the fight against a single Normandy battlefront, perhaps squashing the allied push.

In summary:

Nintendo: Cheap console aimed at an untapped market
Sony: Expensive console aimed to fight for an already tapped market

Nintendo was able to sell at a profit because the hardware was nothing new, the software and applications were. They were able to sell at a profit to a ton of people because the market they went for was untapped. Sony's hardware is much more cutting edge and expensive by design, so to sell at a profit, they would need their $599 USD price range back. Problem with that price point is that they were aiming for an already tapped into market that the XBox 360 had. Nobody wants to spend 600 dollars for something they already own.

That's a pretty random tirade. Don't drink and Slashdot.

At any rate, I don't see how grandparent is suddenly a "corporate mouthpeice" because he suggested you open a /small business/ that caters to a market that those "evil corporations" are intentionally leaving behind. If anything, he stands opposed to those "evil corporations" considering he's suggesting you open a business opposed to them.

They aren't trying to make 3D with Wii. They are talking about the Nintendo 3DS, the next of kin in their handheld lineup that is going to be released in North America in March if everything stays on schedule. The console creates 3D environments without the use of 3D glasses.

The console does not simulate 3D using the simple trick of using motion control or head tracking in the way Johnny Chung does in those Wii videos. The Nintendo 3DS is a uses a real 3D screen (top screen. Bottom screen is not 3D but is still a touch interface, like the DS(i) bottom screen) manufactured by Sharp that uses a parallax barrier over a switching LCD screen. In layman terms, it allows the screen itself, rather than glasses, deliver different images to your left and right eye, allowing your brain to reconstruct the image as needed.

I don't have to. The law already has. This likely will end up being implemented no different from the definition used in other cases involving pornography and underage access which has existed for ages and has years of judicial precedent.

Possibly. They would do so because it is the law (I said "IS" the law, because that already... "IS" the law in a lot of countries including, I believe, the UK).

They can't, and probably don't intend to.

Right. And that's what they are trying to implement, allowing the adults to have their own, uncensored, Internet be as simple as a phone call. It doesn't sound like they intend to charge more money for the service or anything of that nature.

As far as the need to remove commercial content, junk food and the like, I don't see how that protects children as to get physical access to those "harmful" substances, most end up having to rely on parents to get access as, at least young enough not to know the harms of eating junk, children don't normally make money. Access to pornographic websites is easier as the material is provided to you the moment you enter the website. This argument is clearly a reactionary one. One law can't do everything. It'd be like writing an anti-crime law that stops crime... period. Is that to say anti-crime legislation is a worthless lie because someone robbed a candy store yesterday? The most you can do is take a step in the right direction. Whether or not that step was actually in the right direction or not is debatable.

I am in no way in favor of something like this gaining ground where I live, but regardless, to say they implemented this is some conspiracy for the purposes of creating general censorship rules is simply a slippery slope argument.

I don't honestly believe that this is some kind of conspiracy to censor everything. It'd be a good point, were it not for the fact that this particular development would absolutely 100% without a doubt fail if that was the objective.

Boils down to two case:

1. You accept you don't have porn because you don't want to call your ISP. You still have wide-spread Internet communications access, albeit, without porn.
2. You call your ISP to enable porn. You still have wide-spread Internet communications access, including porn.

I don't see how either of these cases result in one losing access to wide-spread Internet communications access. While I disagree with the British Government's position on the issue, as it is most certainly an attempt at censorship or at least an attempt to create a chilling effect against porn, it's not an attempt to censor or create a chilling effect against communications in general.

Yeah. But still, sneak arrows would frequently single hit kill most enemies, in particular sneak with poisoned arrows. You get a nice poison effect going and launch a sneak attack with a poison tip, almost everything dies to it. Worse, should they not die, just cast an invisibility spell, wait for their alert to go down, then repeat. There are some things I think they could have improved with bow-arrow mechanics, such as being able to shoot in the head for critical hits, but for the most part, bow-arrow was really one of the most powerful things in TES IV.

I really think it is invisibility that broke TES IV. Even on PC running mods that make the game harder, there isn't much they can do once you go invisible. You just fight them until you are getting weak, and you throw an invisibility spell, toss some potions down your throat, reposition yourself for attacking again, and start the fight again. It'd be interesting if they at least acknowledged you turned invisible and attempt to fight you anyhow. They know where you were, they could simply assume that you are somewhere around there still. Better: if they have a detect life spell, they should use it to see you even while invisible.