I do, in fact, prototype video games in my head just as you described. Why, I'm playing one in my mind right now; a motion-controlled third-person shooter for the Wii U with hyper-realistic graphics and sound effects, which effortlessly blends Ghost Recon-style gunplay with the hack-and-slash/beat-em-up dynamics of…

It's not really that dumb. The brain is a storage device, too. It is capable of reproducing paid content that the bearer of that brain no longer has any access to, like movie rentals. Should people's brains be chipped so they can no longer recall certain copyrighted content without paying a maintenance fee?

When I was about six or seven, I had this really nasty black lab named Jake, once. For about a month, I think. We tried returning him to the pet store, but they wouldn't have him back, so one day, my mom pulled up, opened the front door to that shady little shop and tossed him inside. She wouldn't take no for an…

Stealing one's identity and their credit card information is different from copyright infringement. The information is useless unless it is actually wielded by criminals who intend to steal money from someone's bank account. By your insane logic, a clerk at a gas station is engaging in theft every time they take a…

It's not stealing, nor is it actually piracy. Call it copyright infringement, file-sharing or warez, but don't call it piracy, and don't call it theft. Real theft and piracy of copyrighted works is a serious issue.

Y'know, I've seriously thought about this before. 1-meter cubes actually are accurate enough for basic planning work. And if they're not, you can always scale the project up a bit. Say, make ten block-lengths count as one meter. That, of course, means you'd have to place a lot more blocks.

Isn't this supposed to be Big Boss (a.k.a. Naked Snake) and not Solid Snake?

Indeed, some disorders of the brain, such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease, can't be treated by simply manipulating the existing structure. The only way to restore lost capacity in the brain is to replace it somehow, either using an artificial substrate or induced pluripotent stem cells (the non-embryonic kind) to…

Very true, but I guess I didn't make my estimations clear enough. 20 years until science fully understands the structure of the brain. At least 30 to 50 more years after that point before they can actually alter its structure non-invasively to cure psychiatric disorders. About 2060 to 2080ish would be my guess.

Just wait another twenty years or so. Neuroscience will have advanced so far that all psychiatric disorders will be considered physical, structural issues of the brain rather than simple "mental" disorders. I've always hated how mental issues have been dismissed as a simple matter of the mind, and therefore placed in…

Don't the people who made this game find it the least bit ironic that they're talking about a lack of maturity in the gaming industry when their own game's script reads like something written by a horny twelve-year-old?

I don't think most people realize this, but actors are actors. Most of them read from a script, and follow directions. That's it. Be it live action or voice acting, most of them don't really know the behind-the-scenes minutiae that go into storytelling, or what it takes to advertise a film. In fact, some of them…

Obligatory.

And all the rigid, robotic movements that come with it? Heck no. Just look at the cutscenes in Halo 3 and compare them to the ones in Reach. Mocap is light-years ahead of anything you can do by hand, but it still needs tweaking and massaging to get the performance capture data to look right, or else you end up...…

There are a few things about this article that I'm not too sure about.

I always feel better when I put my tinfoil hat on. See, if I put a Faraday cage on my head and suddenly feel less down in the dumps, that proves they're beaming waves at people.

They wanted to bomb the Grand Coulee Dam? Fuck them. I took a trip up there recently and it was beautiful. Took thousands of photographs while I was out east of the Cascades. Learned about the history of the dam while I was out there, too. That thing was built to last, under FDR's keen and watchful eye, by people who…

I have an IBM Model M 1391401 that I got off eBay a while back for $20 before the mechanical keyboard craze started. I've also got a Unicomp Customizer 104 USB keyboard, a reproduction of the venerable Model M. So, yeah. I've got a couple of those buckling-spring keyboards. They take tons of force to actuate the keys,…

http://youtu.be/ Right now, I'm using a Metadot Das Keyboard Ultimate and Logitech G500 mouse, replacing my old MS Sidewinder mouse that wore out (that one lasted way longer than most mice; I tend to wear them out completely in the span of about a year, to the point where the buttons become unresponsive, but the…

If you look at a list of some of the best video games on the planet, chances are good that 80% of them are SP-centric. I'm so, so very tired of this multiplayer craze. I'm sick of seeing cool games getting completely gutted in service of this ridiculous notion that the ability to play with your friends is of paramount…