Miguel Batista

People on Facebook use their brains? Not on my fucking feed.

Wow, the oddly popular "did it with my sister" porn category suddenly makes a lot more sense.

It's always the ass holes who want small government isn't it? "Obama care is big government messing with people'still personal choices! Now hand me 20 bucks so you can watch porn you sex trafficking child molester!".
 
Part of me would like for them to create a register of people who unlocked the porn so we can see all these legislator's names plastered all over it.
 
As for porn being too accessible, well, educate the children in sex Ed and teach them that porn is not a relationship replacement. But of course teaching kid's sex Ed is probably evil in those old fart's eyes.

Source
 
My take on it?
ABOUT FREAKING TIME
 
Just as Lee Mathews (article's author) stated, Flash has been a cesspool of bugs and vulnerabilities and it's been years since it became the go-to point of entry for application and web hacking. It's time we let it die off. We have alternative technologies that do everything Flash does, but better, faster, less vulnerable and with less resource requirements. YouTube's move to HTML5 proved this.
 
I'm curious if Firefox, Opera and Safari will fall in line with the initiative, but I'm not holding my brearth either way.
Now to start lobbying for more antiquated technologies to get killed off. Java, you're next on my list.

No, this forum uses JavaScript, which has nothing to do with Java.

Someone is wearing a tin foil hat. 

You are absolutely right. but it's cost and bureaucracy. I used my 980 ti at ESA for computing tasks for a couple of days because a new computer takes forever to be cleared. Back in Portugal, my 980 ti had more power than my uni's "supercomputer" that thing was built in the 90s and they couldn'the replace it easily due to the high costs. I am sure this will be a huge boon for them.

I was hyped to get a 1070 at launch for $380, but once I saw how all the cards were selling for near the $450 FE price all of a sudden my 970 didn't look so bad. 

That is exactly why cards are not selling well. I thought about getting a 1080 but I couldn't justify forking out 800 euros for a marginal improvement over my 980 ti. Reselling my 980 ti would've net me about 350 euros at the time. That would mean 550 euros for a marginal improvement. I have a friend that has a 970 and plays athe 1080p. He feels like he needs nothing else. It certainly doesn't justify the price. 
 
Value. That is why NVidia is selling less than they intended. They are lacking value.

a nice breakdown for those who havent seen it 

"piracy" does not hurt sales in any way shape or form
since the very beginning of this phenomenon, there is absolutely no hard evidence to prove it hurts sales - none whatsoever
 
people who "pirate" are people who would otherwise not bough the game in the 1st place
there are exceptions, but this is the main force behind why this phenomenon exists

And as cdprojektred as proved to everyone: it does not

I know how to use a search engine. I also know fellow economists working on the particular field, and know through them how hard it is to find such evidence - in particular because a credible identification strategy is hard to achieve. In other words, we lack good data on piracy by its very nature, and even with it, it's hard to isolate its effect from everything else.
Hint: random links aren't evidence. Have you even read any of them?
In fact, the stronger evidence available is indirect evidence in the music industry (which is a different industry than the blooming gaming industry): record companies changed they type of contracts they sign with artists, trading a lower share of record sales for a slice of the income artists make from concerts and everything else (so called 360 contracts). The accepted explanation is that record labels noticed they were more affected than actual creators by piracy, due to their income relying more on record sales, while artist had concerts, etc., hence they push for a change of terms to split the whole pie.

Damn Bruxelles passing this laws on to the brits... oh wait!

So, think the electronic spying going on these days can't get any worse? (or think that it doesn't matter for you?)
 
Guess again.
 
"But what about my rights to privacy!?" you might be asking. How do these companies get permission to sort through your phone?
 
Source:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-25/no-credit-history-no-problem-lenders-now-peering-at-phone-data
 
Well now. Don't we all feel violated and spied upon? Still thinking that the whole "nothing to hide nothing to fear" argument will protect you? I know I don't.
 
Although, I find myself wondering if people could use this knowledge against these companies to spoof their credit rating by calling and texting each other more. That would be rather hilarious in my mind. I can see a benefit of this, if you (like myself) have absolutely no credit score because you refuse to take out a loan unless absolutely necessary, and refuse to get a credit card, but it still seems like a bad idea on the part of companies as well as general consumers.
 
Discuss.

What a lot of people fail to realise as well is that we are creating these tools that can get misused by a policeman checking on his ex or by  future government body that wants to install a dictatorship. Problem with this information is that once it is out there, it is out there. there is no going back from it. How long till a less than scrupulous government (let's say le pen in france) stats using these tools to prevent opposition members to gain political traction by exposing everything about them? You are giving away to those in power a very effective  mean for them to keep their power.

EA  acting decent, Trump is president... the world is about  to end...

the UK didn't need the EU to screw them, they already do it very well on their own 

I guess it comes down to how much of a threat you perceive terrorism to be, personally I judge it to be almost a non-existent threat on a personal level. Beyond that, I'd say it's a miniscule threat to a functioning Western Democracy. And there's far better ways of dealing with the threat, than to start spying on your own citizens. It's a tired point (and many people have made it better than I can), but fixing Western Foreign policy would be the starting point. It amazes me, genuinely, how many people miss that blindingly obvious point, and would rather walk naked through airports than even consider "bombing countries back to the stoneage" installing a token democracy then fucking off, or arming rebels to incite regime change, dropping some bombs then leaving them to it, might come back to haunt us.
 
So, it's an easy question for me, giving up our rights for the "cause" of improved safety from the "terrorists" is a significantly greater threat to Western Democracy. And I seriously question the motives of those in charge that continue to use the overplayed threat of terrorism, to diminish those rights.
 
 
 
 
 
 

and training, and an airforce, and cruise missiles and a bunch of other stuff the professional military has that normal people don't. But sure, an AR 15 is going to kick down that government even though they can kill them from 20 Km high using a drone firing hellfire missiles.
 
Why do these topics always reach a point where a gun nut will come and talk on how the people in Europe cannot fight their government because of the lack of guns? it is tiring really.

Helmets are a must have IMHO. I can tell you about the time where I had a nasty crash on my mountain bike and a metal spike from my pedals lodged itself in my helmet or that falling at 50 kph on a road bike an helmet can mean the difference between becoming a vegetable or not. 
 
Regarding paper, it is extremely tough. The Chinese even user paper armour that was very good against arrows and puncturing blows. It the paper is oiled it should hold in the rain which btw, is perfectly fine to ride in. I don'the know where you live but here in the UK if you don'the ride in the rain, you don'the ride at all.

Yes, I read this interview back in 2015... And I am not running in circles. I am merely arguing that consoles are disappearing and the game debate was a tangent. I already admitted I was wrong. I don'the know how that is "embarrassing myself" I find your general tone and aggressiveness over this issue more embarrassing. I also find embarrassing that you keep hitting that one point instead of my broader claim that consoles are disappearing. I posted plenty of links and data on my previous post that you fail to address. so, let me state again my argument:
Lower console sales and an increase in the pc market size means that consoles will not be around for long. I might be wrong but a loss of sales in the order of 40 million for ps4 and 70 million for xbone compared to the previous generation is huge. It means that newer titles that are not released for previous gen consoles are missing a huge chunk of market.The PS4 pro is one of sony's answers to fight this. If they thought everything was fine, they wouldn't have bothered. 
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=/amp/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2016/9/9/12867004/ps4-pro-vs-pc-xbox-one-project-scorpio&ved=0ahUKEwiIiNLa4q_QAhUsIsAKHe1xAL4QFggaMAA&usg=AFQjCNEuysJkJduMCI5k1Et0Dy5zGHKtUQ&sig2=R5JAP9jZ1lO10C5eSGfkgQ
 
Here is a link from Sony's boss saying just that. Enjoy.

Yeah... I am doing this on mule phone so posting links is a bother. Here's the interview:
http://www.dsogaming.com/news/cd-projekt-reds-marcin-iwinski-most-of-the-witcher-sales-are-for-the-pc/
It's from a YouTube interview close to the launch of Witcher 3.
 
The numbers from statistit brain  (cool site btw) raised are different from the the ones I read which were close to the release (12 million total) and not agglomeration numbers so I was wrong with regards to Skyrim.
Here's another interesting website with a curious methodology. Mind you they only keep track of physical copies so a mix between this and steamspy should provide interesting results:
 
http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=skyrim&publisher=&platform=&genre=&minSales=0&results=200
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Regarding market share, lower number of units sold is a smaller market. Sure people still game on he 360 and PS3 (heck, I still takeen my PS2 out of the cupboard and plug it it now and again for nostalgia's sake) That doesn't mean that they vaporized but it means new releases will Ave a smaller audience than the previous generation. Now I know correlation is not causation but add to that the growth of the PC market space (and only based on steam data and not on other platforms like GoG, Origin and battlenet) and the picture for consoles starts to become not so bright. Consoles outsell pc for now in the same games but I suppose I could be bothered and track a game series over a period of releases and compare the numbers through steamspy and vgchartz and see the market fluctuations... 
 
Skyrim
http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=skyrim&publisher=&platform=&genre=&minSales=0&results=200
 
http://steamspy.com/search.php?s=Skyrim
 
Oblivion
http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=Oblivion&publisher=&platform=&genre=&minSales=0&results=200
 
http://steamspy.com/search.php?s=Oblivion
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So oblivion (2006) sold 7.4 million on consoles and 1.6 on steam on PC (disregarding physical copies not Steam distributed) which is about 17% of sales whereas skyrim (2013) sold 15.18 million copies on consoles and the most conservative estimate pointed to 5.4 million on Steam so even that is 27%. if we go by Steamspy'says number as a maximum estimate then that number changes to 42%. Of course two points don'the male for a linear regression so we can add fallout 3 (2008) which sold 8.87 million on consoles and 2.32 on pc to get a market share of around 21% and then fallout 4 (2015) which sold 11.12 on consoles and 3.71 on pc which gives us 25%. So now we can get somewhat of a trend. Of course older games tend to sell more on pc due to Steam sales and humble bundles but it is what it is. For fallout 3 I only considered goty edition users. 
And a final note, of course more games have to be used covering different genres but because we had talked about skyrim I made these with Bethesda titles.
 
Final disclaimer 2: if you want to play on consoles, that is fine by me. I am merely arguing that they are a dying breed. Which makes sense if you consider our society is moving towards system that integrate more and more functions together and consoles are very limited in what they can offer compared to a PC not to mention that laptops with gaming grade cards are getting cheaper and cheaper and for many young people, a laptop will be a necessity and a console a luxury so if they have to choose one laptop will win.
 

EA  acting decent, Trump is president... the world is about  to end...

That's the same argument that people use to justify not wearing seat belts. Sum it over all possibility space and there is still a huge net benefit to helmets.