The gnome deathknight doesn't exist without the servers, regardless of how much you did, or didn't pay for it (directly or indirectly), if you prefer a more F2P comparison, ships in Star Trek Online, or some of the tanks in World Tanks are examples of a this. You can get a statue made of your ship, tank, or gnome deathknight, but it's not a ship, tank or DK, it's just a statue of it. Without the world that makes it hd wallpapers exist it isn't anything. An ebook is just another variant on book, book on papyrus, book on paper, book from printing press, book in german, book in english, book in electronic format, and without amazon you'd be locked out of the only format of that book you paid for, even though one of the other book formats would still have had value to you. A Magic The gathering card stored 'in the cloud' that you could access anywhere would still have play value if you could take it out of the cloud if the service was to shut down, as you could still play the game without the cloud storage. In this case the game is shutting down, and the data it has can't be 'pulled out' separately.

An ebook has none of those costs, to charge the same price for something physical that costs money to get into your hands as something that is essentially free once they've paid the editing, proofreading, and other pre-production costs is nothing short of highway robbery. And as another poster High Quality Wallpapers said, you own a physical book. You don't own an ebook.Were it not for collusion, the competetion would ensure that ebook prices were far loawer than the price of a physical book.

This paper is as close to marketing as science ever comes. The use of the words 'NP-Hard' and "video games" were chosen specifically because they sound impressive, not because they've shown anything useful. They came up with some way to connect those two words in a paper (by morphing Mario, and defining it in a way that never entered any cartridge. If you have a finite number of paths through Mario in an arbitrarily large map, and some choices make the game impossible to beat because you get stuck, then yes you have an NP-Hard search problem. But there is no Mario level like that, and never will be because it would be boring). It also fulfills the other requirement of marketing, that it makes me feel dumber after reading. This super-annoying movie comes very close to showing the method used in this proof [youtube.com]. It solves a problem that no gamer would ever face, and no GTA Wallpapers level designer would ever face either, unless his method was to randomly drop blocks on the screen, rearrange them into chunks of which some are impossible to pass, and then rearrange those randomly. Can you see how this has absolutely nothing to do with the game we call Super Mario Bros? In other words, the authors saw the attention people got for using the word "NP-Hard" in relation to Tetris (look! Made it on BBC! ), and though "wow, maybe if we use the word NP-Hard in relation to Super Mario Bros, we can get on the BBC too! There is absolutely nothing novel about this result, and in fact, it might be a homework problem you would give to students in an undergraduate class on computer theory. Given the right introduction, the students could easily do it. It is a blatant attention whore attempt.

To me the real problem is focusing on the wrong details. Take Skyrim for example. Is it really a big thing if they, say, tripled the detail on the existing characters? Do the NPCs need pores or drops of sweat? Or would it be more interesting to walk into Whiterun, and there's a 100 NPCs walking around, or you assault a fort with the Stormcloaks and there's 100 other soldiers at your side attacking the 100 Imperials in the fort, and clouds of arrows raining down [nice knowing ya, shieldless dual wielders :-) ]? It's a "more detailed objects" versus "more objects in the world" sort of argument, I guess. I'd rather see the power applied to "more objects" at this point, IMHO. No, actually they are not. I had dabbled a lot with 3D in 2007/2008 and I can tell you no engine whatsoever delivers accurate foliage. What state of the art engines do is return a good approximation by filtering obstructed objects out of computation. Transforms are not live and lighting is a very rough estimate, ignoring subsurface scattering and calculating shadows out of a reduced mesh. Want to go even further? Fur and then cloth. Fur atm is non existent in real time engines (to create real tangible fur in a Max scene can introduce thousandfold increases in computation) and don't even get me started about cloth. So yes, graphics hardware isn't anywhere near a plateau. The 5000fold estimate is a reasonable one if not optimistic. IMO hardware will continue to leap forward untill state of the art processing will be able to simulate realtime physics of high density meshes by just knowing the material properties of each mesh (which has never been as much as suggested). As for displays, those will keep growing both in physical dimensions and resolution because there just are uses for that (and before anybody argues think how many people thought `17" 1024x768 is all you need`) If you have absolutely no money, well, sucks to be you? Sorry, but in a world where people spend 1000 bucks on a TV, 25000 on cars etc. etc. etc. High Quality Wallpapers 500 dollars in disposable income on a console, which lasts for 5 years is targeting anyone who makes 35K/year or more. It's not perfect, but what else do you expect? We're not going to resell PS2's for 30 bucks here. There are about 100 million consoles sold at the price point of 700-300 dollars (launch price to current price), which is a pretty wide distribution given that not everyone even likes games, and lots of consoles serve a lot more than 1 person. Sure, if you don't live in a first world country consoles are insanely expensive, no doubt, but then you'd have a stratification of consoles for the 2nd and third world and consoles for the first world, since people who *can* spend 500 bucks on a console will want a better experience than you're griping about at 50.