I never intended to suggest that it did. I’m simply stating the fact that, ultimately, if you already have no money to begin with, the developers can’t get any money out of you whether you pirate it or not. Of course, the situation changes when you actually have income, and have to start weighing purchasing decisions…

because we can.

The difference is, the only way to acquire filet mignon if you can’t otherwise afford it is to deprive someone else of it. Taking software you can’t afford actually deprives nobody of anything, even revenue.

The reactions to the “I pirate because I can’t afford it” notion are a little unnerving; everyone seems to be seriously comparing it to stealing a car or TV or whatever, when they couldn’t be more different. I mean, really — If you steal a TV, you are actively taking something owned by someone else and thus depriving…

The more we learn about the human mind, the closer this may come to being a reality, so I’m hopeful =)

The words seem to work as a metaphor, yes, but the notion may still be rather different. A neural network is built to simulate, in a way, the physical manner in which our brains function, but that doesn’t automatically mean they’re intelligent.

Actually, my guess is that whatever copy of the software people are using was simply only given animal pictures for its training process. The google research blog post on deepdream shows a photo of an image generated with the neural network having been trained using places instead of animals, and it imagines buildings…

wait, since when was this an AI? It’s a neural network that does image processing and it developed in such a way that it ended up having a thing for animal heads. It may also just be that the input images they provided it had a large number of animals. Either way, it’s still just a neural network.

duh, they’re seeing how deepdream will handle the uniformity of a starscape.

My solution has worked pretty well for me so far: Don’t play any games that require origin/uplay.

well, we ARE talking about To Love-Ru here...

noted.

How bad it is is mostly irrelevant. It could be better than steam, but the fact that I’m forced to use Steam to run a Steam clone and login to another account before I can play the game I purchased from Steam is patently ridiculous. It’s an unnecessary pain in the ass, and it only exists so that the companies can try…

Okay, I lied, I have one more final note. I do play old games on emulators. Actually half the reason I bought my Shield Portable was for emulating old console games. Games I’ve bought ten times over on different platforms because I’m a total fucking sucker for nostalgia. I’ve allowed myself to get nickel’d and dime’d…

Oh right, and as a final note, I will never ever again buy any game that requires its own special Steam-clone to play. I bought Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon and this was my first and last meeting with U-Play. From that point forward, I have not played any game from Ubisoft or EA, period. I haven’t even considered pirating…

I pirated *everything* when I was a teenager and had no money.

also: the talk about the Indominus, how audiences aren’t thrilled by ‘just dinosaurs’ anymore and want something bigger and badder and more scary... seemed to me like a thinly-veiled commentary on Jurassic Park movies. If you watch the movie and replace all references to the park’s customers with the movie’s audience,…

waiting for new games on vita: hahahahahaha *sadface*

For gaming, it depends. I generally would prefer three displays side-by-side, so that you have a wide field of view. Certain types of games benefit from this especially well.

I just bought two of the Monoprice 28” displays a week ago. They’re quite nice. Thankfully the reflectiveness of the glass hasn’t proven to be a real issue with my room configuration.