But can you imagine the effects in the long term? It's like making a habit of paying terrorists who hold hostages. You don't pay the bad guys to set things straight, otherwise they'll have an incentive to ruin them even more in the future.

Outsource to Africa?

The ones who should be doing this are the retail stores trying to sell the players....

Not necessarily.

Not sure about NVidia's card's, but right now two of AMD's 4850s are cheaper than and just as fast as a single 4890. It's the best deal around the $220 price point.

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-price,2323-4.html

Because they're unreliable, tend to overheat, and have expensive games that run at low framerates.

If you build your own PC you can make it out of highly-rated (by other purchasers of course, don't trust "consumer reporting" agencies) parts and carefully cool it so it works nicely. Building it from scratch this way will be more expensive than getting a console, but if you're just upgrading it like you are saying in your post, it won't be.

I see many people arguing that cheats allow casual players to have fun playing a game. I disagree; having difficulty levels is better. Cheats simply let you skip the content altogether, while difficulty levels will allow you to lower the difficulty just enough to enjoy it. 4 is a good number - 1 for the complete novices, 1 for the casual players, 1 for the hardcore players, and 1 extremely hard difficulty just for fun (think Nightmare mode in Doom 2).

Help restore internet infrastructure by force. Information is everything.

It could be done as a group project.

Won't happen. The video game industry is a lot more mainstream and diverse than it once was, so the idiocy of a single company would probably just be like a single goat that was buried under a stampede of goats. Sucks for the goat, but the stampede goes on.

And any artist who actually contributes nicely to a good mod will be able to jumpstart a career in that field using their mod as part of their "portfolio." If they can't find a job with what they made, then they probably weren't that good to begin with. So a lot of people who achieve any real success in the mod community, will probably end up dropping out of it because they are so skilled.

For an average Joe, getting good at any part of modding takes hard work and isn't immediately rewarding. Most people play games to have fun and be immediately "rewarded" and positively reinforced. Modding doesn't provide that unless you're either already good at it or enjoy producing utter crap - and given that most people aren't already good, we see lots of crap.

Community ratings with a blacklist system, to keep Penisworld out of G-rated games no matter how many trolls think it would be cool to get it in there, would take care of this quite nicely. You won't see much crap float up to the top with a good ratings system. People could still browse the bad mods, but they could also choose not to have to sift through them to get to the good ones.

The main challenge (after advertising of course) is to make it easy for the musicians, level designers, texturers, modelers, etc to express themselves, to spark initial interest in them doing so. With models, you can just have them submit the models in any popular format, allowing modelers using different software packages to contribute content. But with levels, a good map editor is important to get skilled mappers with free time interested and productive. Of course, this is an investment in its own, so overinvesting in this could defeat the purpose of crowdsourcing.

Really? Even in a position of "leadership" in school you don't really have that much more power, and so I never really learned this in school.

That, my friend, is what we call a statistic outlier.

I thought Windows operating systems were tied to their original machines when installed by an OEM? Or is that only for the newer ones?