Marek

Out of curiosity, does anyone have experience with playing FPSes on, say, a MacBook Pro? You obviously use an external mouse, but is the WASD on a small laptop keyboard comfortable at all? Reason I'm asking: I love how TF2 / Ep 2 / Portal are shaping up, but I might hold out on them for like a year until I have a powerful new machine that can play them. My current PC is getting sadder by the day.

Ouch andreadst, I think he's insulting your parents!

I'd always assumed I had seen Tron once on TV, years ago. It had dudes with helmets in teams and there was VR racing. Tron, right? Except now I actually have Tron and it turns out that while I've always been familiar with its visual style, it's a movie I have actually never seen. Now I'm really curious what I did see on TV -- that movie that I always assumed was Tron. One thing I remember is that they had this VR bike scene but they also had an odd kinda-futuristic type of sport which played out in live action in a circular arena that resembled an indoor bicycle racing stadium, with like wooded floors etc. Does anyone know?

Yes. That's it. THANK YOU. Interesting, Rollerball looks NOTHING like Tron. Somehow my memories of seeing parts of two different films must have fused together in my mind like some freak transporter accident in Star Trek.

What?! Some people actually thought this would be an MMO announcement? Amazing.

The climate crisis is obviously a big issue in the world right now and I don't think we've talked about it here much. How concerned are you about climate change? Have you noticed it in the area you live? And is there anything specific you are doing to help fix the problems? I'll tell you my point of view. Like with so many people it all came together for me after seeing Al Gore's film. I knew most of the facts already, but I hadn't seen them put together this way before. I did some further reading on the interwebs. Then in March, when I flew back from GDC in San Francisco, I happened to be in the same row as a climate scientist, who told me many stories about how serious the situation is. He also gave me a stack of New Scientist to read through, each issue having at least one alarming report on global warming. In the same row also sat a man from an organization in Portland. He told me stories from the other side, about how his organization is trying to make the state of Portland a leader in carbon emission reduction and clean energy, and how other states and countries are working on this too. While Al Gore's DVD spoke to me on a rational level, speaking to these people on that flight made the issue even more tangible and personal to me. In Holland we've just had a CRAZY April, which had the kind of drought and temperatures that we normally only have in the middle of the summer. It was a new record, but just one in a whole string of records over the past two years. Things have been changing very noticably. For a while now I've tried to do a lot of things to 'do my part'. I'll tell you about them because I'm not so secretly hoping you'll have done or are planning to take similar steps (whatever steps seem right to you). What I did right away was switching to green energy and getting better lightbulbs. These are good things to do because it tells companies that consumers will pay a little bit more for green energy, and that they should produce more of those nice efficient lightbulbs. While I'm not into excessive conservation, I did install a switch so I can easily take nearly all my electronics off stand-by, which has actually also lowered my bills a little. I already walk most of the time and use public transportation for everything else, but I've begun purchasing carbon offsets for my flights (the controversy over offsets notwithstanding). Today I began a monthly donation to the Clinton Foundation, whose Climate Initiative is responsible for 60 of the major cities in the world working together on making their cities cleaner (e.g. by jointly ordering tons of LED based streetlights, dramatically lowering the cost and encouraging more production). They were also responsible for getting Richard Branson to commit the next 10 years of profits of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains to research in reneweable clean energy (est. worth 3 billion pounds) -- as well as other huge accomplishment in just the last year. I felt they deserved more support. I actually just signed up for it and it's what made me think of writing this post right now. So getting back to my original questions, what's your stance on climate change? And has it affected decisions you've made?

Nachimir, awesome post. I get sick whenever environmental groups pitch global warming as "save the polar bears". Fuck the polar bears. The message should be: save your own interests. To your list of benefits I would also add economic growth. Switching to green technology etc. creates a lot of jobs. The UK seems to be benefiting a lot from its aggressive carbon-reduction goals.

I could possibly come although only if it's in a weekend and if I can do a blitz visit, cause I've been spending a lot of my free days recently and now I want to save them up again for a proper holiday.

Is season 3 that bad? I thought it was about equal to season 2, with the exception of the first couple of episodes on New Caprica, which owned me totally.

If season 4 is the last season and the finding Earth thing is wrapped up, I wouldn't cry about it. Not letting the series drag on too long would be an elegant thing to do. I'd love to see spinoff / miniseries / direct-to-DVD material follow the series finale though. There's already some really positive buzz on that Pegasus mini-movie they're doing.

Sorry if I've lost the ability to be nuanced and simply say "the majority agree". Too much debating with people who don't believe there is climate change at all has caused massive entrenchment. So: there is consensus over the existence of climate change; there is non-unanimous (but huge) consensus that the problems are caused by human involvement. But yeah. Elmuerte, I now understand what you mean, and it makes a lot more sense. There is a lot of hypocricy with these issues. (Schwarzenegger turning just one of his many hummers into a hybrid comes to mind.) Although in the case of Al Gore's film, they went to great lengths to make the entire production and promotion carbon-neutral, to print the DVD box on recycled paper, and so on. I don't doubt that these things don't make the whole thing 100% clean, but it does strike me as leading by example. It would be surpising if Denmark is building windmills that basically have an efficiency below zero. That sort of thing would never fly unless there was some kind of insane evil government subsidy. I've heard a windmill (non-offshore) in its lifetime delivers 80 times the energy it costs to build and maintain it, including transportation costs, repairs, etc. Maybe it just takes a while for a windmill to win back its investment? I'm also pro-nuclear, but only as a temporary quick & dirty solution until other tech comes online. They're doing a big international project with nuclear fusion in France but it's sadly a very long way off.

Err, that would be cosmic rays, not comic rays. Although who knows what comic rays can do.

Yeah, got carried away with the 100% there, but it's nearly true. How about "99.9% agreement" or "there's complete concensus". I know about the AAPG and they've announced they're updating their position on climate change, as their members oppose the current stance. (These are mostly petroleum geologists we're talking about.) As far as I know only Timothy F. Ball believes global warming isn't happening. He's been widely ousted as a fraud who uses fake scientific credentials and is quite likely paid by the oil industry. A handful of genuine scientists do have other theories about what causes climate change (e.g. comic rays, natural temperature fluctuations) but agree that climate change is happening.

Long reply ahead (sorry) but there was no way I could answer your reply with just a few sentences! Firstly, I can't tell if you believe climate change is real or not? On the one hand you say the problem with climate change is people's unwillingness to relocate. Thereby you seem to acknowledge that climate change is real and could have serious consequences. (Though if you think if only people moved around a bit there wouldn't be a problem, it's a serious misjudgment of the kind of problems climate change causes.) On the other hand you seem to disacknowledge climate change as hype. Well, it isn't something that was created by a marketing department, or some crazy meme that came out of nowhere. 100% of the scientists on Earth -- people whose jobs it is to be skeptical and look for evidence -- agree the climate is changing rapidly. 100% of the scientists on Earth also agree that it is "extremely likely" that it is due to human involvement. "Extremely likely" in science means "we actually know this to be totally true, but we are still scientists". Climate change is a reality that's then been acknowledged by politicans, NGOs and (thankfully!) many corporations. If companies are trying to make a buck getting people to buy greener products, EXCELLENT. The documentary you've linked has been elaborately rebutted point by point many times. One of the people featured in that film has sued the makers for incorrectly portraying his views. Trying to discredit the person Al Gore or trying to sow confusion over specific statistical details does not debunk the core message. You are correct that wind and solar power are not as efficient as they could be, but saying they are bad ideas is incorrect. They're already good ideas, soon they will be great ideas. There's been massive investments in solar in the past 2 years, and there's an awesomely growing market, and innovations happen left and right. Thin-film solar panels are now coming online. Hopefully dye-sensitized solar cells will follow soon (1/10th the cost to produce). It's nearing its tipping point. Denmark is already getting 22% of its energy from windmills. How is this not good? I'm honestly not familiar with plans for windmills in the ocean, but presumably creating the island in the sea is what would make it not cost-effective. By the way, there wasn't a climate crisis in the 70s. Maybe you are thinking of the oil crisis, which "vanished" as soon as oil supply was properly restored. Ozone depletion was only a theory in the 70s. In the mid 80ies the hole above the south pole was actually discovered, and all countries then took action. By the mid 90-ies all CFCs had been phased out. So it also "vanished" but not because it was not real. On the contrary. Elmuerte, I hope you'll get a less cynical view on this issue. Great progress is being made...

The Spore delay is fine if they're doing it to make it a better game and/or make it work on multiple platforms simultaneously. I don't know what's going on at Will Wright's studio but you could guess that they've been focused on building the tools, catalogs and animation systems for the creatures, buildings and vehicles, which has probably been going well, but the big meta game isn't as compelling. They recently recruited Soren Johnson of Civ IV fame which is as significant as someone like Sid Meier helping out on the project. I'm hopeful Johnson hasn't been assigned to a Spore port or platform-specific spin-off but is in fact helping flesh out the strategy portion of the game.

Awesome, I checked out Skyrates and I will check this out too.

Haha holy shit.

Some people ate a goat, they didn't watch it being slaughtered for entertainment.

Can I be the first to say: what's the big deal? They basically stuffed a real animal with some prepared haggis and let people eat it. Wow. Are we going to have the same level of controversy whenever people roast a pig above a fire? Not saying that it's smart of Sony to do this shit. I personally don't welcome it much for the perception it creates, but I'm not personally offended by it either. Let's talk about those airbrushed bikini's though. I like them. What do you think?

Has there been any meaningful speculation about future updates to the Macbook / Macbook Pro? What would a LED screen do for me? (Uses less energy?) I have a 1,5 year old Powerbook G4 which I bought just before the switch to Intel. I'm probably going to get a new laptop in 1,5 years (instead of my usual 4 year upgrade cycle) since I use this baby for pretty much everything. But I don't want to make the mistake of buying something too early again.

Yes many developers give assignments or tests to programmer candidates.

My memory is a little hazy but I think back at GDC Tim Schafer made a passing comment about an announcement not being too far off. Umm, yeah, that information is not very helpful.

Is there a page 2 of that anywhere?Edit: nevermind http://www.mixnmojo.com/galleries/gallery.php?gallery=298&image=3685&goback=

That last line in the article is very illuminating. See, it was all Microsoft Word's fault. Word is like a thought simulator. It allowed the shooter to rehearse his violent thoughts over and over again.

Yes Adium is great. VLC is also a must-have.