AC, can you explain how you interpreted the parent post as a conservative (or political in any way) statement? When I see neo-Nazi types crowing about their right to free speech yada yada yada, it's usually a sign they have misinterpreted "freedom of speech" as "responsibility to be an asshole to strangers". And the use of a computer program to replace one's own human decency strikes me as a hopelessly ineffective remedy for the longer term goal of restoring civilized behavior, versus simply teaching people to behave more like they do in a typical neutral public space (e.g., there are lots of different people shopping, but you don't often see fistfights at the mall).

So I'm a liberal in agreement with the sentiment above. I do agree about the sucker-punch strategy favored by the right these days though. It's just essentially a lack of sincerity. I just don't see this as an example of it.

Still leftie and still reading Slashdot after 16 years or so and I agree 100%. I only read as far down as the first idiotic comment and that means I don't spend a lot of time reading Slashdot anymore.

Einstein might quibble with the term "simultaneously".

I got an HP Stream 13 at Microcenter for $200. It's not a top-of-the-line machine and the keyboard has some annoyances (especially if you're used to quality Thinkpad ones which nobody else even comes close to anymore). It is good enough to play fullscreen video without issues. Ubuntu/Mint seem to work fine (not 100% out-of-the-box but pretty close to it by Linux standards) including wi-fi, webcam, bluetooth, and all the other bells and whistles I'm aware of.

I believe they're called Hoffman Lenses.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...
http://www.nuskool.com/learn/w...

It is a Samsung GT-E1080i. Mine's a different edition from the ones I'm seeing online because it has Cyrillic (and English) on the keys. But who cares. You can get one for $4 + another $4 S&H off eBay right now. It'll be the best $8 you ever spent.
 

Actually, I was wrong. It is a color display. There's no particular reason for it to be a color display, since you're not going to use it to do anything interesting, but it is.
 

It's just a big solid mess, ok?

Technically the liquid crystals are one color.

I got a Samsung in the Ukraine for about $10 US at a phone stand in a mall. Once I figured out how to get it into English instead of Cyrillic, it became the most practical phone for travel that I've ever found. The screen is just old one-color LCD with a backlight. The battery lasts for weeks on a good charge. It sends old fashioned texts and makes phone calls with better sound quality than the fancy Android I use now. And I never have to deal with the whole phone "locking" thing US carriers have, I can just buy a new cheap SIM card wherever I travel.

It's just a 2XL and a Radio Shack Armatron glued together... I had this in 1985...
http://www.retrothing.com/2006...
http://www1.pcmag.com/media/im...

Also, a fax machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached.

Go beat the straw man for a while...

There's plenty of academic, philosophical, and artistic critique of video games out there. The field changes so quickly for technological reasons that the articles (when focusing on a particular game or games) suffer from rapid obsolescence. Nevertheless they exist.

Interactive fiction (e.g. text adventures, remember Infocom?) was a hot topic in the academic world in the early 1980s. As the consumption of video games has increased, so has the academic analysis/criticism. I'm not going to provide a bibliography here since Google, Lexis/Nexis, etc. will make it fairly easy.

Your ignorance of something is not proof of its nonexistence.