Did you mean SCO/Linux or, really, where's the CowboyNeal/Linux option?

It was actually a legendary family. There was Dong Hung Lo who had two sons. One son was named Wang Hung Lo. The other, first one born in America, was named Richard.

Of course it's not a first-party PS1 controller. You wouldn't want to show off your real weaponry to the public. In the future we'll hear about the mythical SHAM-alamadingdong Tank that was used to Dual-Shock and Awe the Syrian government and totally pwn those n00bs. It's all about the plans within plans, man.

Clearly this is a cover for Aperture Science's moondust-gathering missions. Please get a word out to Mr. Johnson to take precautionary measures against inhaling such dust. These robots are designed to inadvertently deliver the lemons that life wants to give him.

Thank you. Working at the local history room of a library, I tend to cringe when people blindly ask "who needs a library these days?" We're working on digitizing a lot of things and putting them up online. I've been at it for a few years and with all the stuff we have, it almost seems like we've barely started. Among other things, we're currently trying to digitize a subject index of the local newspaper(s) spanning from the 1890s to the early 1990s. The index was originally done with index cards and is housed in an old card catalog. Nowhere near done, we're already reaping benefits from being able to do keyword searches for names not listed as the subject.

Then there are the local yearbooks and city directories, old maps, a school-published book on a town that doesn't exist anymore, history on local banks (now gone), and some information on the people behind the local street names. But yeah, there's still a lot of people out there who believe we don't need libraries anymore.

In the TED talk, he blames things like "we're living longer" for the shortage of organs.

Improvements in trauma medicine, vehicular safety, and workplace safety are the biggest causes for the shortage of organs.

Things like seatbelt laws, motorcycle helmet laws, and OSHA aren't helping either. Catastrophic fatal injuries (especially head trauma) are jackpots for donor organs. Crass, but true.

I personally wonder how companies expect to make money from games when they are giving out the source code.

The same way authors make money even though everybody knows how to assemble and bind a book.

The source code is not the game...it's just framework and presentation.

There's really not that many situations that I can see where developing for a web browser would be more advantageous than developing a game for a native OS architecture, whether it be for a console (xbox, PS3, etc.) or computer (Mac, Windows, etc.). Even for mobile devices, if you design for a browser, what does that leave you with?

The value of video games is 1% technology and 99% game design.

The actual graphics in a game is much like the box art and advertising; it gets people to buy the game, try the game, and discover if it actually is a decent game. They don't improve the gameplay any more than Tony the Tiger makes Frosted Flakes taste better. They do, however, let games compete for shelf space alongside other games with decent graphics.

Successful browser games are the best thing to happen for gamers since games moved from the arcade to the home in the early 80s. They lower the barrier to entry and increase the amount of risk developers can take. We can get new genres, new mechanics, new designs...new everything. Publishers aren't going to take risks with $30 million development pricetags. All the fancy graphics/physics/art/music/voice/etc ever did for us is lock us into seeing the same shit every year.

Imagine taking the entire development budget of EA Sports NFL $year and making a thousand "crappy flash games" instead. You'd end up with a whole lot of shit and a handful of real gems...games that will be played 20 years from now, unlike the nth iteration of the same expensive low-risk crap.

This is far too appropriate: http://xkcd.com/484/

the coffee maker (usually coffee girl) would make you any coffee drink you wanted, and has your preference memorized, usually for free as a company perk

I'm not sure a machine ever gets that good.

Minimum wages kill that possibility up here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory

I grew up when phone numbers were public information. Everybody had a book where you could look up the phone number and address of anyone in the area. A few people were unlisted at their own request, but this was the exception.

Phone numbers and addresses were treated as public knowledge.

When cell phones first arrived, receiving calls cost money, so cell phone numbers were kept private. Now that the cost of incoming calls is much, much lower, there's little need to keep treating these things as private, especially with people replacing land lines with cell phones.

The problem lies not with facebook making this data available; the problem lies with everyone who pretends this is secret information to begin with. Some companies consider your phone number to be a unique identifier. Other (idiotic) companies treat it as an authenticator...something nobody else knows. Mix those two and BAD SHIT HAPPENS.

SSNs are treated the same way. Some places use them for identification and others use them as a freaking password. Frequently an individual bank or credit provider will be using a SSN as both a username and password simultaneously. THAT is the heart of the problem.

Would knowing the address for the White House help you steal Obama's identity. No, because everybody knows that is public knowledge. The problem is the people who think "wow, this guy knows his own address, so he obviously must be who he claims to be, because nobody else would know that"

There's no question that the US has an extremely ugly history when it comes to relations with Latin America. The Monroe Doctrine was grossly twisted into a license to establish hegemony over the Western hemisphere and join the emperor's club of Old Europe. Half of the current problems in Latin America stem from US meddling. I've lived outside the US long enough to have a realistic perspective. Culturally speaking, we certainly prostitute ourselves to the entire world. We're okay with that; you aren't.

In one breath, you call us a whore and complain that our prices are too high.

What makes no sense is that you, despite all your invective towards the US, will readily sacrifice your personal honor and integrity at the altar of US commercialism. It is, in many ways, a disease, this "keeping up with the Jones'" or "he who dies with the most toys wins". What you don't realize is that you have also been infected, and you are helping to spread it.

If you can't stand Sony's pricing, if you hate what the advertisers are pushing, if you loathe what it all represents, then walk away! Don't become a prostitute yourself. If you have to amuse yourself with a Balero, then do so. Your kids will respect you for it.

I should just NOT play games? Should I resort to a Balero (Cup-and-ball) only because that's the "noble" thing to do?

Only you can answer that question. I don't know what your honor is worth to you.

There is a cultural gap in play here. I do realize you actually feel personally insulted by Sony's pricing structure, but that doesn't translate here in the US. Business is business; it's not personal. Americans in general feel it's perfectly acceptable for sellers of non-monopolized, non-essential goods to charge whatever price they wish. The idea of one day being the seller of a highly-coveted product is central to the "American Dream"; it's part of our national psyche.

Personally, I think you demean yourself more by resorting to piracy as revenge. The noble response here would be to take your business elsewhere. Perhaps that's considered too passive or cowardly where you are from. Maybe your culture expects a more active response.

Either way, don't expect much sympathy on a US-centric forum. Americans just don't have that honor/revenge mindset about business.

So considering all this, will you tell me why sould I care about getting a $800 console (almost 2 months salary), pay $100 for a game, and be told by sony/MS "we don't allow your kind here, get the fuck out" on PSN/Live. For me, piracy is a form of boycotting sony, for treating me like a second-class citizen.

Keep all of that in mind before thinking people who pirate games are just "cheap".

You could always take your business elsewhere. MS and Nintendo do offer, in the grand scheme of things, a comparable product. Your rationalization of piracy as a just and noble revenge against perceived insults from a Japan/US-centric company is complete bullshit.

You are just being cheap.

Linux doesn't have fragmentation issues either, unless you're goin for the fud route.

The commercial Linux companies don't have a strong financial incentive to fragment the market. They rely on app developers to directly support their product, and if they stray too far from OSS principles, they lose the dev support. There is not enough money to be made locking in customers to overcome the losses on the development side.

Phone companies do have a strong incentive to fragment the Android market. Their business model relies on making it as difficult as possible to switch providers and to provide incentives for unnecessary hardware upgrades by artificially restricting software upgrades to newer models. They don't care about openness. They don't have to. They are the phone company.