Will they also build a Battle School? If so, I wanna go.

Well, actually It is 11:15 pm, April 1st 2013 as I type this (Central Time Zone, USA.) So, you are incorrect.

Very well put. I appreciate this explanation. I do not pretend to be up on my geography OR geo-politics, so your response was very helpful for my understanding of the situation. Thank you.

Can someone explain to me what it is that gives such a small country that has comparably weak military (they are ranked number 28 in the world according to http://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.asp) and pretty much zero chance of surviving a week in a real war the balls to be so dickish and war-hungry?

Are they really THAT brainwashed and misinformed (or uninformed) as to believe that they can just threaten nuclear war every time they don't get their way? It's like a little kid threatening to run away every time he has to eat his broccoli.

The only scary thing here is that sometimes, very rarely, the little kid DOES run away for an hour or so. Well, I hope for the sake of any innocent people in North Korea that this little boy doesn't run away, and instead learns to shut the fuck up and eat his broccoli.

I took a look at the panorama and it is indeed awesome. But I found myself immediately trying to identify "objects" and patterns. Not because I believe that there are non-natural artifacts there, but because my brain started saying "Ok, let's see what kind of ridiculous things Richard C. Doucheland will claim as proof of aliens".

I like the guys enthusiasm, and I share a very small percent of his views, but I honestly cannot take him seriously at all. I've never seen someone so intelligent be so purposefully stupid. "Oh and look what we have here ladies and gentlemen. Rectilinear geometry. You can see it plain as day. All you have to do is look. See? I zoomed this low resolution jpeg by 2500% and you can start to see all sorts of lines and squares...where there should be none! It looks...like....a pyramid, people!"

Sometimes I think he's actually a reverse psychology experiment. The government uses him to discredit his own theories by having him use the most ridiculous "proof" possible, "proof" that even a middle school kid can see is absolute hogwash.

I use a Logitech G510 keyboard because I game often, and I like the backlit keys with customizable color (although the brightness is pretty lacking). This keyboard easily covers multifunctional (has mic and headset inputs and an LCD display with different applets), comfortable, aesthetically pleasing, customizable (programmable macro with additional 18 keys with 3 preset quick-switch keys, ability to disable windows keys, user defined led colored backlit keys, etc.) and precise. Not cheap, probably not able to withstand violent impacts, but definitely a good keyboard for those who game and don't mind non-mechanical.

My mouse, a Logitech Anywhere MX, is the best mouse I've ever owned. Wireless laser with Dark Field Technology is awesome as I have a glass table as my desk at home, and this mouse works perfectly without a mouse pad, right on the clear glass. Tracks perfectly, is comfortable to use, has a nice weighted free- or geared-scroll wheel (selectable by pressing the wheel down), two thumb buttons, can be turned off when not in use to save battery, and has a nice overall weight and feel. However, it can chew through batteries pretty quick (2500mAh rechargeables) and the wheel is really sensitive even in geared mode (screen will jump up and down if you barely touch the wheel half the time, sometimes just by moving the mouse). But I forgive the shorcomings for the massively comfortable upgrade of being able to use it on a glass table without a pad. It's comforatble, aesthetically pleasing, multifunctional, precise, but not cheap or able to withstand impacts and not very customizable beyond standard button assignment options in the driver software.

I suppose that this means my priority is functionality, which is a bit of a grouping of options, but cheap and rugged don't really factor into my purchasing decisions.

I see all these people listing a myriad of devices and I feel like an amateur. 1 Android phone (Droid Inc) 1 HP netbook 1 printer 2 desktops All on my wireless router. I feel.....less geeky. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that.

I pretty much agree 100% with TFA. Especially about the use of a mouse and having easier configuration of a game.

I recently reinstalled Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2, as I wanted to do two full playthroughs of each, one as a good guy and one as a dick. I have all the DLC for both games, and am currently enjoying the bad guy playthrough on ME2.

After reading this article, I realized I had been thinking many of the same things it points out. Especially because of ME2.

For example, in ME2 there are areas where you cannot save. These are usually missions, and it can be frustrating if you suddenly realize you have to leave for work or some other engagement, but your less than halfway through getting Jack from Purgatory station. You either have to lose your progress or be late for work.

The worst offense of ME2 (in my opinion) is how ridiculously difficult it is to customize your graphical and quality experience with the game. With ME1, you had several .ini files that you could scan through and change this or that to suit your needs. Easy tutorials and guides exist to let you know what all the settings do and their effects on the game. With ME2, they have all these .ini files boxed into one file called coalesced.ini, and it's not standard text style. There is an editor you can download called coalescededitor, and it does a good job of seperating everything out so you can make sense of it, and even includes a section of jump lists to get you to the most common settings to change. Such as disabling mouse acceleration. But, why should the community have to be the ones to implement a user friendly way to make the game experience better and more well suited to your system? Would it really have been so difficult for the company who HAS the code and the devs to have just put an extra menu in the config program that allows you to make these changes in a simple and efficient manner?

This leads into what is probably my biggest gripe about modern games (modern, to me, being roughly 2006-ish and up), and that is texture quality. This is a simplification of the issue, however, but still valid and indicitive of inherent issues with dumbed-down configurability. Lets take Mass Effect 2 for example, since it's still fresh on my mind. This is a beautiful game. Great color variety, awesome level designs, cool architecture through out, and some of the best looking character models of any game ever made. The animations (mostly suit-capture), the decent AI, and the storyline are just awesome. But, this game suffers from a very VERY common problem that virtually every game exhibits - garbage textures.

Now, don't get me wrong. The majority of the textures in ME2 are very good or even surprisingly realstic and superb. Take Zaeed for instance. His head and face texture is probably the best looking character texture I've ever seen in a game, even better than Crysis or Crysis 2 characters. Every time I see his face in the game, I seriously think "Man, that is friggin awesome work they did there."

But then I see Jack's body texture (normal costume, not alternate) and think, "Why the hell does her tattoo texture look so damn muddy and blurry? Why wouldn't they try to make a damned TATTOO'D body texture look super detailed and crisp?" And I look a the floor beneath my character. Muddled and blurry. I walk up to a wall. Muddled and blurry. I watch a cut scene with a close up of a mech. Muddled and blurry.

I understand the technical side of this issue. Higher rez textures use more memory and take longer to render and all that jazz. Blah blah cry me a river. This isn't 1998, and I don't have an 8Mb 3dFX card. I have a relatively cutting edge 560Ti 1Gb card. It can handle textures above 512 resolution. So stop hardcoding texture limits, and instead allow us gamers to use 4096 or 8192 textures if we wish. If your still using a Geforce 5600, well, time to upgrade anyway.

I also realize that using texture sizes of 8192 won't always fix a muddy looking wall when your character jams their nose against it, and using 8192 texture sizes on every part of a complex character model is just impractical, but that kind of brings the point full circle. Find a way to map smaller texture sizes onto the same piece with higher overall texture definition. I don't know how you would do it, as I'm not a programmer or game dev. I just think it would really be a good thing for the gaming industry if they figured out how to permantly get rid of muddy garbage looking textures.

Well, that's my two cents. I'm out.

Personally, I'm surprised no one saw this coming. Not really the whole online single player thing, but the massive amounts of bad reviews on the first day of release from a rushed game from a money hungry company.

I think the lesson here is that it's kind of stupid for Microsoft not to have used some type of disc stabilization or even lens stabilization technology. Tech that has been used in 20 year old car cd players and walkmans. Granted, slamming your Xbox or computer around isn't advisable in any situation, but the guy in the video wasn't being rough with the system. All he did was lift one end up to about 45 degrees. That should not cause the type of damage seen in the video, unless there is absolutely no disc stabilization technology in use. The thing is, Microsoft has a history of disc scratching in the Xbox systems, and they seem to not have done anything to fix the issues.

Ugh. I just noticed that I mispelled "maybe" in the story summary. Now I feel like I have lysdexia.

Did no one see this coming? Every time one of these customer-raping companies says they have achieved new levels of DRM-Uncrackableness, they are proven wrong within 24 hours. How stupid are these people to continue to waste millions of dollars trying to secure their software from being pirated, only to have their efforts shown for naught within a day, three days at the most? And how do they not fucking understand that all they are truly doing is pissing off customers and running their company name into the ground? Every time I hear about a company pulling this crap I get more disgusted with software companies. Oh, I know they have a right to protect their properties and profits and all that jazz. But, damnit, consumers have a right to expect a certain level of quality and usability WITHOUT draconian restrictions and double talk and non-ownership-of-a-product-you-paid-to-own type bullshit. This is EXACTLY the reason I choose to pirate a large amount of the games I play. I paid for Mass Effect because of the outstanding (to me) gameplay and story/graphics. Same goes for Dragon Age : Origins, The Witcher, Boderlands, and Divinity II : Ego Draconis. Yes, there is a bit of DRM to those games, but it isn't anywere near as retarded, insulting, lame, fucked up, and basically fucking illegal (or at least it SHOULD be illegal) as forcing me to be connected to the internet to play a god damned single player game that, other than the fucking DRM, has abso-fucking-lutley no reason to connect to the internet. Fuck Ubi and I hope with all seriuosness that Assassin's Creed 2 gets cracked and becomes the most pirated game in history while simultaneously becoming the biggest financial failure in the history of video games. Maybe then these companies will stop with the DRM and find a mutally agreeable way to protect their work without screwing over their customers.

Betrayal at Krondor/Return to Krondor, the old floppy disk D&D games like Eye of the Beholder and so on, Journeyman Project, Oregon Trail (this could be an epic game), Messiah, Black & White, Final Fantasy TOTAL AND COMPLETE REBOOT FROM THE BEGINNING, Baldur's Gate series, and many more. If I had the money and resources (and time), I'd love to create a game so massive, open, dynamic, and interactive that just the written dialogue for on-screen captions would take a full DVD. I'm talking Crysis meets GTA (all of them) meets Freelancer meets Red Faction meets Star Wars KOTOR meets Fallout (all of them) meets The Sims meets Warcraft meets Fable. A single player game that makes World of Warcraft, EVE, Everquest et al look like a short javascript game. A seemless world. I mean that literally. A fully fleshed out WORLD to play through. Full conitinents, oceans, cities, roads, everything. All populated with like a billion inhabitants. Neverending supply of random quests, and a main quest that would take like 2000 hours of play to complete. It'd have functional politics, functional economy, you could buy houses, cars, bikes, furniture, etc. It would literally be the most ambitious MMO incorporating every gameplay mechanic and feature of the best games, but it would be single player. It would have online capabilities, like other inhabitants would be other players, and you could do some MMO stuff like race, rob a bank together, be partners in a business venture, own a store to sell stuff to other players and what not, but the core gameplay would be single player. Unfortunately, I've envisioned that this game would be so huge and complex, it would require its own multi-terabyte hard drive to run from (and to be packaged on) and would cost upwards of 300 million or more to make properly. By the time it went to market it would cost like $300.00 to buy it, and thus would not sell well enough to be worth it (at this time). I can always dream, though.