Humodour

In fact, one of the HUGE problems with using gold as a standard is that anybody who can mine it becomes rich, and moreover, anybody who can mine it can permanently increase the money supply (and thus the problem of inflation remains). Frankly, I'd rather that power remain with the government, who I can at least elect and throw out. Don't get me wrong - my country would become the richest in the world, but that doesn't make it a smart idea. Gold has little more intrinsic worth than paper, aside form reasonably inexpensive uses in electronics and medicine. Ooooh, shiny! So what - that doesn't make it a good currency.

Does anybody have more info about this?

http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/04/25/1241241/phoronix-confirms-gnulinux-steam-and-source-engine-clients Some people have suggested that this might be a first step towards a Valve console, since Apple and Microsoft probably wouldn't want to liscence their OS's to Valve, and Valve probably wouldn't want to pay licencing costs. Either way, yaaaaaaaaaaaaay! About damn time. Once I figure out how to de-RAID-0 this computer I shall install the latest version of Ubuntu and await Linux Steam's release, because I am damn sick of coding on my netbook, and coding on Windows is a ****ing joke.

What? Besides requiring you to be online to use it? Not that I believe there's nothing wrong with that - there is, and it's why I feel very 'meh' about Diablo 3 - but is a barely-tolerable form of DRM the only wrong thing Steam has done? Because it has done that since inception and only gotten better since, so if your gripe with Steam is only that, then it'd be good to establish that. I can't remember who on these boards that I am quoting, but I've kept this quote for a while because I found it hilarious:

It seems we lose our ability to concentrate for long periods of time on games as we age. Not because our concentration gets worse, but because we need to constantly divide our concentration between real-life responsibilities and the game we're playing; it becomes very hard to devote 100% like we did when our only care in the world was that our mothers were going to make us go to be early and wake up early even if we stayed up late.

And that is the story of how Steam made itself immune to everything. Is it a bad thing, though? I don't think so. It makes me buy games I wouldn't have otherwise bought, at a price so cheap that it doesn't matter if it is **** or if there's a risk of Steam going bankrupt and me losing all these games I thought I 'owned' (honestly if that happened I'd just hop on Pirate Bay). Steam is largely immune to criticism because it makes all parties at least mostly happy and keeps them that way.

While we're suggesting amazing bands, I highly recommend everyone listens to the Arcade Fire's album The Suburbs. It's a highly thematic album and each song feeds into the next, so while they're artworks on their own, you get something extra out of it by listening to the album from start to finish.

Indeed? I would say the term 'indie' is a bad term precisely because everybody has a different definition of what it means. I don't really agree with your definition. Which supports my reasoning. Hah! Oh rubbish. Have you BEEN outside? It's hard for me to get around Canberra without stubbing my toe on a high-quality live musician (highly doubt Melbourne or Sydney are any different). And most of the time they are an engineer or chemist or economics or law student or something, or a public servant, or whatever - the point is you wouldn't expect them to beat out the awesome tunes they do. But they're good either way. Maybe it's a generational thing, but yeah as somebody who doesn't practice an instrument I'm leaning towards being the odd one out among my various peer groups. Hmm. Maybe you meant it's rare to find actual musicians in music these days. But again, I would point to the Triple J Hottest 100 of any recent year as evidence against such a claim. Sure, there's plenty of synth, but there's plenty that isn't. And hey, at least it's not rap, right?

Sure he could be a bot. But if he's not, then you've just been rude and unwelcoming. jayceww, hello and please follow these instructions: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1751

And who do you think props up all those 'rare good people', Wals? Because most of them are not millionaires, most of them don't have millions of hands, or minds, or even perspectives that they can use at once. And the number of 'rare good people' expands dramatically when you expand the definition to 'normal people' who are experts or professionals in a field (which thankfully even the dumbest among us tend to be), your scepticism towards the concept of change being driven by 'the common man set free' really starts to fall apart. The Internet would unambiguously be a society-shatteringly good thing even if its only purpose were to magnify the abilities of those 'rare good people' (who are rather common), but thankfully it isn't. The Internet is not a uniform good, like much of technology. But damn, mate, it has a pretty smegging good track record. By the way, if anybody is curious about some of the ways the Internet has, is and will be shaping humanity in the future, these topics are worth doing some research on (Wikipedia is a good place to start... haha): Kaggle Wikipedia Linux GNU Kickstarter Mozilla Raspberry Pi Khan Academy (while this fits well into your 'rare good people argument, Wals, the fact is ordinary people have been sharing their knowledge freely and accurately on the Internet since its inception - all those tutorial writers for whatever topic you can think of and which we all find handy fairly often are a classic example of the power of the average joe when given a medium to share his expertise in his field) Mesh networking (check this out if you're curious about truly eliminating Internet censorship, or are curious about ways to decentralise the Internet and thus make it more fault-tolerant)

Sub-optimal/unique builds were my favourite thing about Diablo 2. The fact that Diablo 3 has all but disallowed them is probably a big part of why I have zero interest in Diablo 3.

I was just flicking through country stats and when I read the list of the countries in the world ranked by number of Internet users I did a bit of a double-take: there is a LOT of untapped potential left. LOTS of new citizens will be added to the Internet every year for decades to come. Including from nearly-developed countries like Poland, Italy, Brazil, and Russia. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2153rank.html?countryName=Australia&countryCode=as&regionCode=aus&rank=25#as Edit: to clarify, my core point is that the Internet still only covers about 1/7th of the world's population (with low saturation in key developing countries like Nigeria, Indonesia, China, and India), so it's quite likely we'll see a 3 or 4-fold increase in Internet user population in the 10 and 20 years. That will bring a lot of changes with it, just as the rapid increases in Internet size of the past have (I don't know if you guys have really noticed, but the Internet is for better or worse no longer the domain of scientists, academics and techies that it was in the 90's and early 2000's).

http://www.breathingearth.net/

Aw ****.

That's ridiculous. My history would show that I purchased the game, why can't I use a workaround to make it run? I guess I'll just have to throw the original exe into the steam folder everytime I open steam just in case. Thanks for the heads up. You don't own your Steam games, I don't think.

Noch besser!

Hmm, never really thought of it as patronage. Nice.

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The people, the culture, the history, the accent, the language, their ingenuity... *swoons*

It is 11pm at night in Australia in Autumn in La Nina. The temperature outside is 16 degrees. That's pretty warm. I mean, I'm sitting on my chair naked, and I don't feel cold. The weather has been chaotic here for a while now. I mean, we're used to extremes - it is Australia - but now the weather also changes so rapidly between days and even hours.

That's fairly true. However a lot of these people are giving money on Kickstarter to support the concept and the developers, and may have significantly less interest in actually playing the game.

Humans are apt to dream. Oftentimes it works out well for them.

You need to build up a name. That might involve, for example, making your first game free and open source. It also means you should polish the game as much as possible to make a good first impression. Because while many people are not as picky as the posters in this thread with their Kickstarter charity, you do still need SOMETHING to differentiate yourself from the Kickstarter masses and attract some investment dosh.

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/the-terrible-cost-of-our-longest-conflict-20120417-1x5y8.html A thoroughly ambiguous war. The Taliban are evil. But we shouldn't even be there. Or should we? And that cost is $1 billion extra per year we could be using to balance the budget or build new infrastructure.

Also known as my birthday.