Yantelope V2

Seriously, the whole "you guys are cold and cruel" is such a liberal cop out and has nothing to do with actually discussing what is or isn't good about a universal healthcare system or how best to utilize public transportation. The moral high ground of "we care about the poor" is just a really weak defense for policies that are clearly inefficient and expensive. The "point" has always been the same. The "point" is simply that the numbers can be skewed and are not always a good representation of the quality of life in a certain area. Why is that so hard to understand? Can you really not see how someone with an agenda can arrange the numbers to overvalue things like public transportation where they are unnecessary?

My current rig: Core i7 920 2.6 GHZ cooled with a corsair A50 cooler. MOBO: Asus P6T 18GB DDR3 (3x2GB, 3x4GB) Sapphire Radeon 6950 2GB 1TB HDD and 2TB HDD (mostly for backup) Antec 900 case Blu-ray drive and a DVD burner drive Linksys Wireless N dual band card Hauppauge Wintv HVR 1800 PCI I have some old Saitek gamer keyboard and a MX1000 logitech laser mouse. Corsair SP2500 speakers I won from the HardOCP event this spring I also have a Logitech G35 headset I use when the child is sleeping. My monitors are some scavanged 24" and 22" Samsung monitors from work.

Ugh.... I didn't say it's not a factor at all. How you balance those factors is what is of importance. Again, broadly saying access to public transportation improves everyone's life is simply not true.

Nobody is being condescending to the poor here. I understand that these things are important to the poor or the people who use them. What we're talking about is a base measure of an average standard of living. if you're averaging things out then skewing your numbers for 3.4% of people who are poor does not give you a good average measurement of the standard of living. Going back to my example again. The people in city A are clearly better off on average so it would be ridiculous to say that city B is superior. For the record, I don't know if it matters or not but I did use the light rail here to commute for a while until I changed jobs and it was no longer convenient. I did like it when it was convenient. I have nothing against using the rail stations. I still use them to go to sporting events myself. Additionally I have multiple times given money to buy friends new tires or a new car battery or whatever they needed to keep their car running because they were very short on money. Not having money does suck. I'm not trying to be insensitive to that. It's whether or not I'm sensitive to poor people is just completely irrelevant to discussing how you rate the standard of living on average in a country, state, city or whatever.

Example A: City A has an average income of one million dollars, everyone owns houses and their own cars and their own health insurance and they pay for everything themselves. There is no public transport, healthcare or food stamps available. Example B: City B has an average income of $1, nobody has any money but they all have access to public transport, state provided healthcare and access to food stamps and such. According to the metrics you can drum up you could "calculate" that City B has higher quality of life. That's my point. It's an extreme example but I'm just saying "quality of life" can be calculated however you want.

@Dean, if you live in a city, take for an example, Highland park, where everyone there pretty much owns $500,000 houses then if there is no public transportation system then it has literally no effect on the quality of life in that city and it would be in error to assign a super rich city like that a lower score for not having a public transportation system. http://en.wikipedia....and_Park,_Texas "For instance, in December 2010 the average price of a home on the market in Highland Park was $1,202,369" Edit: they do have public transport there, I'm just saying that if they didn't it probably would make zero difference to the people living there.

You're pretty much showing just how closed and biased you really are right here. I am not against public transportation at all. I never said I was against it. I said rail systems were expensive and inefficient for large suburban areas. I never said I don't care about the people struggling around me and I didn't say screw the poor. We already have programs for all these things and i don't think those programs should go away. What is so telling is how you make the automatic assumption that if someone doesn't want a universal health care system he's a cold hearted jerk who cares nothing for those around them. We're not even talking about the poor here. Do you not realize that a universal healthcare system actually has nothing to do with the poor? What it does have to do with is if you do have money and still don't buy health insurance then that's your right. People should have the right to be stupid with their money and they should have the right to waste it if they want. It's about freedom for those who do have money.

I don't understand where you're getting this from. The whole last two pages or so where you and Battra have been talking like quality of life measurements are shit because they factor in people with less money than you. Could you have missed the point more entirely? I had nothing to do with factoring in poor people. It has to do with factors like "public transportation" have no effect on the lives of a vast majority of people in many areas.

Well, Portal 2 had a shockingly natural look to it and for it's day HL2 did as well. I don't think it was a lack of post processing though as much as it was like you said, an emphasis on high quality textures and it seemed to me at the time their handling of shaders and post processing was actually quite good.

I'd also like to add that my big hope for future game consoles is actually less focus on the poly meshes and types of texturing and such but I'd really like to see a much heavier focus on the post processing aspects of the engines. Typically things like motion blur and anti-aliasing really kill performance when done properly but in my opinion it's things like jaggies and simply not rendering images in a way to make them look natural which is really hurting graphics. Crysis was so exciting to me and in a lot of ways still looks better than most everything out there because of the procedural ways it handled lighting and motion blur and other post processing effects.

I think that's pretty unfair. Nobody is advocating the elimination of medicare or public schools or public transportation or anything of the such. What conservatives are opposing is the unstoppable expansion of those programs.

I just don't know if there really is any way to keep things from ballooning. Just look at the credits of any movie now with tons of CGI. They go on for almost 10 minutes with hundreds of graphic artists and animators. I don't know how you can make your artwork more detailed without increasing the man hours it takes to produce. Maybe we need to teach computers to paint?

I'm not surprised. Too good of a deal.

Oh come off it TN, we all know who you really are.

I'm a little surprised to see this because weren't they going on about how long a life Unreal 3 still had in it? Wasn't that the point of the Samaritan demo?

I don't understand where you're getting this from.

http://dealnews.com/Sony-Play-Station-24-1080-p-3-D-LED-LCD-Bundle-for-200-free-shipping/576872.html Wow, if it played nice with AMD graphics cards and if I had money I'd be all over this.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/activision-considered-fake-fire-drill-to-hack-into-infinity-ward-pcs/096206?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mcvuk%2Fstream+%28MCV%3A+Home+Stream%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

this sucks. It means that they can keep it mostly under wraps. If only we had an EA insider who could tell us the truth of what really happened....

@Dean: your "choice" is more or less paying in a ton of taxes or paying in a ton of taxes and buying expensive healthcare right?

Well, a couple of things. First, everyone I know owns at least one car. In Dallas if you don't own a car you're very very poor. A large percentage of that ridership in Dallas is probably commuters who are saving a couple of bucks and leaving their cars parked at home. I wouldn't call a car a large investment in Dallas either because you can usually get a used car in the range of $2,000-4,000 and most people can afford that especially if they can make payments on it. Yeah, typically Rail systems that actually work for public transportation are subways and elevated trains in tight urban areas. Light rails for long distance travel typically cost tons of money and rarely make it back. Again, health care is a complicated issue so I'm not trying to oversimplify it. That graph you show actually highlights the problem quite well really. The costs keep escalating. The only way to actually reduce cost is to expand supply and competition. Eliminating competition and increasing demand is only going to make that number skyrocket further. It's simple economics really. The UK and other countries are actually keeping their costs from rising as quickly by making people wait half a year for referrals and by limiting your medical choices.

No banner ads on the paid apps for android usually. Free apps do have the ads quite commonly though. Again, almost all of the Kairosoft games are $4.99 on the US play store. I got Game Dev Story and Pocket League story on sale and just now World Cruise Story was only $2.50. I still think $4.99 is overpriced for their games but dang are they addictive.

I know in Texas it's a very insignificant portion of the population who use public transportation. Rail systems are really only practical for tight urban areas. Beyond that it only makes economic sense to have buses and individual cars. Buses are hugely inconvenient in terms of time. Rail systems are hugely expensive and rarely make any sort of fiscal sense. I honestly don't know what the landscape of your hometown is like but living in Texas it's almost a necessity to have your own car because everything is just so spread out. http://maps.google.c...las, Texas&z=11 Well, Healthcare in America isn't cheap per say but it's still cheaper than it is in universal systems. Isn't the medical system in India some sort of free market system that's supposed to be doing pretty well? I know the quality of care varies greatly. I need to check on that one some more. Update: For further info. Dallas has a huge public transportation system called "DART" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_area_rapid_transit It's ridership is only about 1/10 of the total population that it serves though. I'd hardly call that a large portion of the population.

Yes, every metric can skew the numbers. That's why I'm trying to provide relevant metrics. I think the point I'm making is your choices are not simply between no spending money and cheap healthcare or tons of spending money and expensive health care. There is a way to have both spending money and cheap healthcare you just have to allow market forces to work.