Comment A better world (Score 5, Funny) 118
a 63% increase in Oxford commas
Well, thank God for that!
Comment Career (Score 1) 96
I'm 90% kidding, but the idea cracks me up.
Comment Re:Shame on them! (Score 1) 101
How many houses do you have?
The house is a server and memorabilia is the data. Your "backup plan" for the house is hotels / temporary housing while replacing the failed house. Unfortunately, the "data" in this metaphor is copy-protected by the server admin ($deity). Best you can do is protect the house and use approved migration tools when a failure is either predicted in advance or occurs unexpectedly but is not catastrophic.
Comment Dogbert's Playbook (Score 5, Funny) 87
"We're not a fast-growing company."
"And we never will be if we don't lose more money!"
Comment Oops (Score 0) 175
Comment Disappointing (Score 1) 138
Has this become the norm? Or is this mostly just Sony entering into shite agreements because "fuck the users"?
Comment Re: Crank it up (Score 1) 31
Imprisoning someone for corruption would set an...inconvenient...precedent for the society of today.
Comment Wasted effort (Score 2) 107
I suppose their methodology already suggests a distinct lack of consideration in certain choices, but, still!
Comment Prison sentence in 3...2...1... (Score 2) 80
Comment Land usage (Score 1) 209
You would have to build millions upon millions of olympic-sized swimming pools (vats) combined with millions upon millions of acres of supporting infrastructure....
...What.
Do you know what the capacity of an Olympic-sized swimming pool is? Assuming similar output ratio to a 250kL bioreactor (may not be realistic, there's certainly potential issues with oxygenation and other factors), that's about 30 million pounds of meat each year. You might need as many as 3000 of those to produce every pound of beef estimated to be eaten in the U.S. each year. That many bioreactor facilities would displace around 30-40 average size ranches (~15000 acres).
I'll give you that it would require a lot of supporting infrastructure to supply the biofuel, not to mention significant utilities infrastructure, road improvements, etc. This would absolutely cost a staggering amount. Would it ultimately take millions of additional acres to support this level of production? Maybe, but ranches for grazing cattle currently occupy 600+ million acres of land.
Tl;dr: It would be plenty expensive to set up, but the quoted land use reduction seems believable.
Comment Glad to hear it (Score 1) 75
I do wish it was available in higher quality, but that's just how it is.
Comment Off-topic, but... (Score 4, Insightful) 32
Comment Picky, picky (Score 1) 50
A) There were a bunch of mistaken selections (with undisclosed costs) before hitting on the "right" one
- or -
B) It worked on the first try, but "Big Blind" is actually a Hellmouth.
Comment Re:What exactly is "Steam" anyway? (Score 3, Informative) 164
Epic managed this (to the extent they have), by:
A) capitalizing on their hit game "Fortnite" to get gamers to install their platform (analogous to Steam with HL2 in the beginning), and
B) Throwing money at the problem by way of offering a reduced platform cut (only 12% instead of 30%) and by paying developers to release exclusives on their storefront (limited-time exclusivity, not permanent).
Epic had enough capital to generally pull it off, but smaller stores basically starve to death in Steam's shadow. Because, sure, I could buy stuff from other storefronts, but I already have Steam, already own a ton of stuff on Steam, and the things other storefronts want to sell are already probably on Steam, too!