You know it's an insane piece of hardware when you realize that you can blast down the Autobahn at 300km/h with seven crates of beer in the back.

Proud member of the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race.
I feel bad for all you dirty console peasants, especially since your new machines can't even run games in 1080p!

Meanwhile, I shall be over here with my oculus and my 120hz 1440p monitor with the Best Damn Control System Ever: the awesome keyboard/mouse/xbox-360-xcontroller-when-I-need-it combo.

Also, if you really must be a dirty console peasant, here is a simple guide:
the ps4 has better hardware, the xbone has a better controller.

MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAA!

Or at least I will be until my wife finds out how I spent on new PC hardware....

You can't put these side-by-side and assume that you're seeing the best of each platform. It's really just a faster computer... so it would be the same as taking a PC game and comparing 'med' and 'ultra' settings. If you compare GAMES from the launch of a console to the launch of the next gen, there will be a bigger difference as game studios figure out how far they can push the hardware and no longer have to support the older platform. The ceiling for what can be done has just been raised... that's all.

That being said, whatever was being used to get those peeling paint-chips on the door (looked better than a regular normal map) are pretty impressive on the new console.

Looks like this iteration of the series will require an upgrade of my hardware, so I suppose Rebirth is quite a good fit as a name.

That'll be the end of the longest stretch without an upgrade since 1991. The current setup did its job since shortly after the release of Age of Conan in May of 2008. That's 64 months at 10+ hours a day, slaving away as a gaming rig and HTPC. It was the 8th CPU since '91, the 12th video card -- and they're still running just as smooth as ever.

Maybe I'll get some more Cat 5 and use this box as a dedicated HTPC...

Betcha those low db's send kitty into that realm-He probably digs the warmth of whatever that amp or comp hardware he's chillin' on as well...That cats' snoozin'!

I would argue that the design part is feasible, though I would not put it in "blocks". there has to be a casing or a cover, similar to today's phones. In case the phone drops or something like, you don't want to chase after all the blocks flying in every direction. The insides though could be arranged to be replaced, in a "blockly" kind of way, similarly to SD cards or Sim Cards.

Regarding profitability. There could be some serious business here. Think about the billion dollar phone cover industry we have today. you have so many colors and designs, which are made specifically per phone. There could be a possibility to manufacture hardware that could aim for the "taste" of the target market, within a set measurements and requirements.

I think the valid criticism against Putin being the one stating anything is CONTEXT. The charge is that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. Putin is declaring the need for evidence and all manner of polite international discourse and patience that should be shown. The context is just where did Assad purchase nearly 90% of his military hardware, probably including his chemical weapon arsenal, and without a doubt the missiles and platforms used to deploy it? From none other than Putin, so of course Putin wants the burden of evidence to be set at beyond a shadow of a doubt, and wants it voted on unanimously by the UN security council, which he sits on and has reasonable confidence won't be having a unanimous vote he doesn't favor. I don't recall Putin demanding patience and a UN resolution on how to respond to Chechnya a few years back...

I don't know where I'd get access to a floppy drive to copy it.

After he lost in court, the guy bragged to others that he had damaged the hardware he sold me in the hopes it would keep me from launching.

He always thought he was some bigshot that everyone looked up to, so it's not surprising that he blabbed to every other sysop in the area. Unfortunately for him, the truth was that everyone thought he was a blowhard. Most of the sysops were friendly with me because I did a lot of free ANSI screens for them just because I enjoyed it, so it didn't take long for the news to get back to me from multiple sources.

I actually set up such a BBS in 1994 but it never got off the ground. I had purchased my servers from a local shop and could never get them stable. The local shop took them back for troubleshooting/repair, but never returned them or my money.

I took the guy to small claims court where he lied about the state of the computers when they were returned, claiming at one point that I had removed all the mounting screws and taped the hardware together. The judge pointed out that, even if true, he was still required to either repair them (possibly at a cost), replace them, or refund them. Ultimately he claimed that I had cursed at his sister a couple years earlier (via BBS chat) and so he was justified in sabotaging my business. He lost, obviously, and ended up refunding my money. Unfortunately, I had still lost a few hundred on other expenses and the release of Quake was on the horizon, so the window of opportunity was nearly closed.

I actually have the "ACPi MultiPlayer Game Server" software sitting next to me on my desk. I came across it a few weeks ago while going through an old box of stuff. Even though it's completely useless, I can't bring myself to throw it out.

Living in Thailand, most TV shows aren't available here until WAY after the Western airdate, if ever.

I live in a pretty small town. Western movies don't play here, and if I travel an hour or so to a town where they do, they do they are dubbed in Thai with no English subtitles. DVDs are readily available, but they are usually pirated cam copies burned to disc, and again dubbed in Thai.

Games? Not available in stores in my town. Bangkok, sure -- but again they are almost always pirated copies burned to disk. Console games are the same way and any shops selling the game will also chip the console to play pirated disks. I could, and admittedly probably SHOULD use steam for PC games.

Other software? Basically same story as games. If you go to a computer store here, advertising usually says that they are sold with Linux OS or bare drives. But, the shop will automatically put on a pirated Windows plus loads of software (office, Photoshop if you ask for it, etc.) upon purchasing the hardware. They are usually fairly inept at it, frequently have viruses or fail to actually activate the OS, etc. so I tell them to leave the drives bare and do all that stuff myself. But for 99% of people who buy a PC here, they will automatically get a pirated OS and software along with it.

Basically, my default mode of getting ANY media is piracy. Price (free versus not) is a part of that. Incomes are low here, but cost of living is comparatively even lower. Still, if media was fully available here but equal to the price in, say, the US the vast majority of people here don't have enough disposable income to afford much if any of it. A bigger issue for me personally is convenience. Piracy (torrents, etc.) as a distribution system is infinitely more convenient, easy, and "customer"-friendly than any more legitimate service. I get what I want very quickly, usually in multiple options for filesize vs quality on up to as-good-as-broadcast/blu-ray 1080p, with most everything available from a single source (isoHunt, kickass, PirateBay, take your pick). In terms of user experience, legitimate distribution can't even begin to compete with that -- and that is BEFORE considering price.

Instead, they exacerbate the difference by treating paying customers with open contempt. Pay for TV service? Enjoy 10 minutes of ads for every 12 minutes of show. Buy a DVD? Sit through un-skippable ads, dire piracy warnings, etc. before the show actually starts. Move or simply take the disk on vacation to another country and you will likely be screwed by region locking. Buy software? Get some DRM that slows things down or restricts fully NORMAL use of the software, nags you to register, etc. On the other hand, if you pirate stuff all of that goes away. No ads. Watch/use the media wherever you want, whenever you want, on whatever device you want. Software DRM circumvented easily, usually hours after the first release if not *before*.

I honestly see it as a problem that I am not supporting the creators of the media that I enjoy. But, Pandora's box has been opened on this one. Generation X and Y learned to scoff at the idea of paying for music due to Napster. iTunes has been extremely lucky to turn that around even slightly, making lots of mistakes along the way (DRM and device-locking, etc.). Gen Y and beyond are going to have the same attitude towards piracy with regards to ALL MEDIA that we learned to have towards music. I don't think there is any getting around that.

For content creators, I think that funding via Label / Publisher / Network is going to die out. And soon. The good news is that something akin to an evolution of patronage of arts and creators can work even better than it did in the past. The Motzarts and Beethovens of the future don't need 1 rich duke or king to commision a work, they need 10,000 average Joes on kickstarter or the like. I see things trending more and more in that direction, and all the time. I think it is an exciting time -- unless you're an exec in one of the old dinosaur publishers/networks.

Yawn. This was reported as early as November of 2012. It gets on reddit a week ago and now you care?

Apple has a patent for this. They have LOTS of patents.

When they decide to actually include this in their hardware...you can choose to not buy it or protest it.

I hate TYT and all their ilk. It's alarmist non-substantive reporting. I would love to see real journalism outside of the mainstream garbage take off, but this isn't it.

Well, if you let yourself get hooked on proprietary hard-/software, you willingly surrender control over your devices.

Just wait until TPM 2.0, the most fucked-up hardware development of this young millenium, hits the market in force.

Maybe you should think about what is written before throwing out disparaging remarks. My comment isn't about refusing to accept the premise of the thought experiment, it's about the premise of the thought experiment unintentionally influencing responses. Humans respond to what they know, even to the point of forcing specific questions into different meanings because one interpretation fits better with real world experiences/expectations.

The one useful aspect of the question I did point out - despite the physical anomalies - most (all?) respondents will filter the question through the moral "hardware" in the brain, making it useful for identifying the neurological basis of morality. It's an entirely other question what the usefulness of that knowledge is.

Great comment! You raised many interesting points.

One important thing to note that the modern human mind is essentially like an advanced piece of software which runs on antiquated hardware (sort of like running Skyrim on an N64). As many as 7% (though I don't currently have a source for this at hand) of the general population are estimated to experience auditory hallucinations, and surprisingly enough, most of those people aren't psychotically structured. This is why auditory hallucinations are seen as a secondary, rather than primary, symptom of schizophrenia.

Rather, what is actually happening is that the antiquated hardware, for whatever reason, is showing its faults. The primitive responses which tend to stay dormant for most people are finding their way to the surface.

In other words, the truth of schizophrenia is that it isn't so much an illness as it is a regression to a more primitive version of the human mind. And as both you an Eleanor pointed out, this can have both pros and cons. Another example of a broken system which can produce contextually positive results is eidetic memory, which causes a person to be unable to forget.

And this is also something that I find to be quite interesting, because what it means is that mental illnesses are, in fact, contextual illnesses. A schizophrenic person is essentially "sick" because he/she has a bug in his/her software and as a result is unable to download patches from the rest of society. Go back 3000 years and it is entirely possible that auditory hallucination would have been the norm.

The reason for the stigma being so harmful is that it simply focuses on the wrong thing. It takes a secondary symptom, i.e. hearing voices, and makes it seem like the actual disease. In truth, the auditory hallucination is just an externalized version of a process which is actually internal. Where most of us simply have thoughts, the schizophrenic might instead hear a voice. To turn stigmatize those auditory hallucinations is to potentially cripple the sufferer's ability to perform basic maintenance on themselves.