fuchikoma

You're right - one picture would be impossible (or Photoshop!) but it shoots a burst of photos. Engadget explains it a bit better and they actually got to try an early version of it. That was just a concept video though.

I could totally see that working. A lot of webcam security camera software can draw a mask of exactly where it sees motion on a frame. It could just detect a significant change between frames, select that cutout, with a bit of fading on the edges to blend it and replace it with some of the "most average" photos' data. This stuff was posted 3 years ago, but still seems nearly magical in comparison. Near 6 min in they remove objects from video, but I recommend seeing the whole video because it's just awesome.

Thanks for the update. Honestly I'm almost certain to get a Vita, though I won't lie - if a company like GamePark dropped similar system with only controller type inputs, I'd get it first. I loved the PSP so much more than the DS (and 3DS so far) I'm afraid gimmick inputs are spoiling console gaming.

So far, how's the tendency to force you to use touch and tilt in games vs just the standard "controller?"

The vast majority don't have them, but I have seen a few in Alberta.

I guess I'm about a decade late to the party, but I had no idea MSI had a side project band... like most of what they do, this is NSFW and under 2 minutes long.

I've gone on record before, if a system uses ANY system that keeps us from playing games without external authorization, they can keep it. Now, I enjoy a lot of downloadable games and it breaks my heart that in several years if my consoles die, they'll be lost - but I understand that, and I can still at least play v1.0 copies of my disc games if I have to replace my consoles. I'm not going to buy hardware to lease software that I can't keep. I collect games. I still play games by studios that are long-dead on systems that are long off the market. If this is what becomes of consoles, I'll just end up plugging a controller into my PC and playing that instead - I'm already pretty used to that as it is. And as bad as the controls on some PC games are (edit: DRM and IP controls), there will always be ones that have a more acceptable licensing model. i.e. actually selling you the games you buy, or physically effectively doing as much.

Yow. I wonder what the odds are of bone spurs or arterial calcification, say, if you have it done 3-4 times in a few years? Still, it's sure to be a boon to combat medicine. I've also read about electrical stimulation to promote bone healing (I think that's based on old Russian research. Ultrasound has been used as well, but the studies I found had conflicting results.

I was super-psyched for that game. It looked amazing. Then I got the demo and it started dropping me into kill closets and I was out. Then I read reviews that said you never really got time to wander on your own without being shot at and it confirmed my decision. It'd be great if there was a spinoff or something that was a parkour game. I'd be all over that.

Gravity Rush looks good. Seems to get good reviews so far too. Wipeout may be on the list, but after they added interstitial ads to the PS3 version, there's a good chance I won't get it on the Vita or future titles. Other than that... I may hold off for a while on the Vita and see whether or not they try to make physical games pair to the first system they're run on, only work with activation codes, start phasing out physical media again, etc... If I can't buy games permanently, the system is useless and the PSP Go experiment has me cautious now. I do really want the thing though.

Actually, Tetris is a screwed up case. Alexey Pajitnov made the game in 1985, but didn't see money for it until 1996. I watched a documentary on it last night. There was a lot of uncertainty how the rights for that game worked. The movie industry has the ability to make sure those involved in production don't get paid down to a science. Did you know Return of the Jedi never made a profit? And the Harry Potter movies? Who'd have thought! They break even perfectly and no residuals are paid out. In cases like that, I'd make the rare exception and say there is probably a moral benefit to pirating these movies, as opposed to supporting exploitative studios.

To be serious though, there were non-metric currencies long ago. I was going to write about the old British coins - shillings, farthings, halfpence, but it's actually daunting. Probably why it's more standardized now. I read something about a penny being 1/240 of a pound, etc. Japan had a bunch of old coins too - ryo, bu, shu, mon, but it's nice and simple now... no use for even decimals. Just coins for 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 and bills. To me, it makes more sense to measure subunits of the same thing in the same basic unit as larger amounts.

Actually, even though I still stick to some imperial units because of tradition, I think it makes sense to go all metric when possible. For one thing, imperial is truly in the minority now and a common measurement language would greatly help international project teams. It's like if everyone in China dug their heels in and refused to learn English, so any time you spoke with them it had to be in Mandarin. It's hard to relate quantifiable amounts between America and the rest of the world, to the extent that unit converting apps are basically American translators. I don't know exactly how cold cold is, or how hot Hades is, but I do know where water freezes and boils at standard pressure. Water freezes all around me naturally and I boil water for cooking regularly. I have never used a saturated brine solution in everyday life. I'd imagine the only time I would is if I was calibrating a thermometer or trying to grow my own salt crystals. I never relate the temperature in Celsius to 100 when I read it. -20 is pretty cold. 20 is pretty warm outdoors - a few degrees below room temperature. -30 is dangerously cold and 30 is uncomfortably hot. Go another 10 either way and there's a pretty good chance of dying in that temperature. Also, it's just wrong to say metric is impractical or has no benefit in daily life. You could measure something and tell me it's 3 millizubs. I don't even know what a zub measures, but I can tell you already that that is 0.3 centizubs, 0.03 decizubs and 0.003 zubs, which would be the base unit for that measure. As opposed to 12 zubs in a pob, 8 pobs in a fween, 11 fweens in a fof, etc. If you tell me there are 3 ounces of something, I have to figure out if you mean fluid volume or weight. In fluid, if I need a small measurement I guess I'd use a dram? Easy - 1/8 of an ounce - you'd know that if you'd explicitly studied it beforehand... but you'd have to check if it was a US or commonwealth dram, and if you're measuring spirits then it's about 10x as much than if it was another liquid! (Well, technically in the US it'd be 8.115365448442319x as much...) If it's weight, is that an avoirdupois ounce or a Troy ounce? ...since those are the top two of the six most common ounce weights. Is a gallon a US liquid gallon, a UK liquid gallon or a US dry gallon? To me, it seems there are so many ambiguous interpretations of imperial measurements it's like a deliberate attempt to miscommunicate and get something wrong... (edit: haha... water never boils at STP)

As a nerd who archives stuff on PC, I like YYYYMMDD because if filenames are sorted alphabetically it'll also sort chronologically, and it's easy and always possible to enter it as just numbers, no slash or hyphen. I wish Turn10 would loosen up with their units. I took it for granted how in Gran Turismo you could set your units for eachmeasurement, but in Forza 3 you set it for all measurements. So I can see how powerful my car is or how fast it's going - only one. In Canada, cars haven't travelled in mph in ages and I have no idea how many kW a car has or how to relate to that. We use km/h and usually bhp. I think torque is usually still in ft/lbs, but I've seen N m. Tire pressure is also ft/lbs at least for my generation. Ambient air pressure is in kPa though. Does anyone here actually know offhand how many kW of power a given car has? I've never seen someone use that in the real world.

Did someone say...

I thought it was wail - but I guess looking at it, that doesn't make sense - maybe if it meant beating someone until they wail?

I agree it's really about the perception of the DLC. Don't build in a receptacle for DLC, like closed doors, dialog trees that ask you to buy content, or characters who don't do their job until you buy them. Don't charge for things that used to be a given - like new colors or your second costume in a fighting game. Also, timing matters. If you release a game and then a week later sell DLC, it's hard to believe it wasn't just cut from the game (and it may not be, but not everyone knows the whole development process.) I know there's an urge/incentive to strike while the iron's hot, but you also need to let a game establish itself as a standalone product before selling must-have add ons for it. They could reward buyers with things that can't be pirated as easily as pure information. The big folding maps with GTA games. I think Lunar for PSX had a cloth map and a pendant. It doesn't have to be a big thing - even sticker sheets - as long as it's hard to get an equivalent experience through downloading it. Little appropriate collectible trinkets - maybe a keychain for a racing game, a plastic card magnifier for a detective game, etc. It's also kind of weird how rare it is to see mid-90s bonus content now - like sound tests, character designs, promo art, etc. I don't usually see these things marketed separately either, so I don't know why they're not added to options/bonus menus as long as they don't spoil the game (and they could also be unlockable...) That kind of thing could shift the perception a bit so people think the base game is actually 105% content and not 95% content.

I wonder what they could add that they haven't... 4 was stellar, IMO.

Good call - "geddan" is an awesome glitch and meme. Maybe not the developers' fault, but still awesome to watch. For those who haven't seen it, this meme kind of blew up in Japan (online...) for a while.

Shakespeare in the original pronunciation:

I'd think they wouldn't stop every unmanned vehicle for the same reason they don't open every domestic letter and package - manpower and maybe rights issues. Though there's the added concern of them blending in with traffic. I like your "flight plan" idea though. It may catch them as often as license plate checks foil car thieves, which is something. If the sender had to register the course of the car before sending it out, it may help (though it may be as effective as requiring auto insurance too - so many don't have it and just don't get pulled over.) I do know it wouldn't work to make the cars report their itinerary on demand, since they could lie about it. Still, if an officer checked a car in their registry and saw it didn't have a plan, they could pull it over and check it. I think that'd be the equivalent of port authorities checking cargo containers. I've been thinking of hypothetical ways to pull these things over too. Maybe some kind of pylon beacon system - so you could have road pylons (or police transmitters) that send a low-power signal that announces the location of the barrier. Drones have to comply with this standard and stop when requested until dismissed. That way you could pull them over, or keep them out of specially cordoned-off areas. If they failed to stop, the officers could use force to stop them immediately. The problem with this is that someone would find a way to use it to steal from the cars/trucks, so there would have to be some way it could generally interact with the public's cars, but only allow police and special parties to use it. (I'm thinking public key cryptography - so the cops could encrypt it for the car, the transmission couldn't be snooped, and the car could decode it, but even if someone read the car's key and deciphered the message, they wouldn't know how to encode it like the police would because they'd have the "private" key and lack the "public" one. That may become an issue eventually if they had to keep a big list of old, expired keys on the transmitters, but I guess updating those could be part of an occasional road certification for the drones...) Someone stop me if I'm getting way overboard here... I'm interested in firmware design and named after an autonomous vehicle, heh