Honestly ppl, it's just silly news for a day. The world will still be here in all its boring splendor tomorrow. You won't miss anything important.

...unfortunately apple is one of the only companies that is willing to invest in creating new interfaces for new devices instead of slapping windows on there and expecting that it will be useful.

Hence the iPhone for 2 years was one of the only devices with an interface allowing the best use of the hardware. Tons of other phones had great hardware features but crappy interfaces that made the overall device cumbersome.

I have no intention of getting an iPad, but all the reasons the article points out why tablets suck actually point to the possibility that the iPad might actually succeed.

Unlike the other tablets, the iPad is designed with an interface done correctly for a tablet. It's not trying to be a full OS because the interface wouldn't work correctly. It's going with the iPhone OS which is a touch-centric OS.

I'd mod you up if I could. Partisan hacks on both sides try to tell you that their party will do it right next time. Liars! No president or legislators from either party have reined in government powers in recent history.

I liken America to a child with 2 abusive parents. They each play off the other to win the child over then proceed to beat the crap out of them. Then the other parent comes to the child's rescue with candy and toys, telling them they'll be good to them, back and forth never changing their ways. Are we really this stupid?

Logic not meaning AND/OR/NAND/NOR, but as the foundation of rational thought. "Critical Thinking" which was not an option.

On 2nd thought though, maybe we should shorten that simply to "Thinking". Critical thinking probably doesn't make sense to people because they never learned basic thinking to begin with. I wish I was trying to be funny. Logical fallacies are rife; Listen to any political speeches lately? Listen to your co-workers talking about their relationships?

You have committed no sin, my son. Bioshock is one of those games, like the Fallout series, that appeals mostly to the post-apocalyptic crowd. Much of the fun intended in these games is resource management and finding the most "inexpensive" (in terms of resources) way of surviving the environment.

That might mean increasing your skill with the pistol to where you can double or triple-headshot to kill splicers on hard difficulty. It might mean fun with the "Enrage!" plasmid or the one that gets a Big Daddy on your side (it's a lot cheaper in Eve/Ammo/Health when they kill each other). There are many environmental options for disposing of your opponents from leading them into water and shooting with electricity to shooting explosive objects to telekinesis.

The fun in these games is being creative, not just going full-auto on anything that moves.

Quoting GP:

He should have said film school crap. Your assessment is accurate, would you kindly pat yourself on the back for recognizing that 99.999% of everything produced is derivative.

Like the concept of "an original thought". Look at art and culture since the dawn of recorded history and almost everything is just one regurgitated idea after another.

I think what allows some people to enjoy these kind of games more than others is not that they couldn't pick them apart and point out every flaw, borrowed concept, etc, but they choose to immerse themselves in the world and allow their own imagination to run wild as if being there, "Holy shit I'm trapped underwater. I'm scared.. What can I do to survive?" Taking on the struggle of the character, integrating themselves in the story. The developer can't do that for you.

I actually have never beaten the original Bioshock even though I've played through it to nearly the end a couple times. I just didn't want it to end... Really fun getting caught up in the world of Rapture..

Wizards's First Rule: "People are stupid; ..."

An NES/SNES emulator app for iPhone or Android that could download the ROMs you buy from WiiShop would be awesome.

Probably wouldn't stress the CPUs that badly. The control interfaces would be a little weird, but with accelerometer + onscreen/semi-transparent buttons you'd probably be ok.

I like what you had to say. Corporations are not people and should not have the rights as such. I think someone once said a closer approximation to corporations would be foreign governments operating within our borders, and they should be treated diplomatically as foreign entities, nurtured by our laws, but without access to our political system that citizens have.

If you want to organize citizens for the purpose of influencing government fine, but this is not that. I like your programming analogy.

It has something to do with Buckley v. Valeo in which the Supreme Court ruled that spending money to influence elections is a form of constitutionally protected free speech. I tend to think of speech as speech which each person can do in a similar way, but when you spend money you can basically make your voice louder than anyone else which seems a bit slanted toward people with money.

I think national funding of each campaign would be more fair. Same amount of money, no "donations" allowed. I'm sure there are drawbacks to this way too, but I'm not sure what they are... thoughts?

You're actually quite close to the mark, but I think this is just a reflection of most people today, waiting for society to tell them what to like, and that always changes based on who has the most marketing dollar$.

As a result such people are terribly confused and constantly wondering why they're not happy, but never seek enough self-awareness to find the answer. It would be nice if a trend started where people would actually take charge of their own lives and determine for themselves what is good and true.

I like Fallout's model for location based damage. It doesn't have multiple buckets of hitpoints per limb (fallout 3 sorta does), but instead you get a damage multiplier and an increased critical hit chance, which if successful can cripple a limb, blind the opponent, etc.

I'm not sure why MMORPGs feel like they have to dumb it down, even though the result might be people min/maxxing the skills needed to run around hacking everything's legs off. They could find a good balance and keep the added realism and tactical choices.

Unless you are performing the Picard Maneuver, that is.