For those looking for BrainTree and getting results for a town in Essex (like I did), the URL you need is http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/

"APB's already unusual payment plans"

Don't you mean "APB's *awesome* payment plans"? Being able to "pay as you go" means this might be the first MMO I ever play as I've always opposed paying a monthly fee for a game I may or may not play depending on my free time in any given month.

This is only my opinion, but I believe the video/gif which has been circulating of the guy Kintected to Star Wars from Sunday night was, indeed, faked. He was just copying what he saw on the screen. I think this is the case because the exact same video was shown during Monday's conference. *However* I do think Kinect is real, and works, as all of the demos at Monday's conference appeared believable, and there were even a few unresponsive moments which you'd expect from any advanced technology.

As a side note, I'm a massive Nintendo fanboy, I've never even considered buying a console from the "other two", but after watching the conference last night, I'm very *very* tempted to buy a 360 for a nice voice & gesture controlled HD media centre! Well done Microsoft (can't believe I just said that!)

I disagree with this, although my point also stands for any console.

I own a Wii with three remotes, two nunchucks and two classic controllers, I've had them since launch and never needed to buy any more even when four of us play Wii Music (the only game I have which can use four remotes & four nunchucks). Why? Because my friends all have Wiis, when they come over to play, they bring their controllers with them.

I may get arrested for suggesting this, but surely on release day, and for as many days as possible after, if there was a DDOS attack on Ubisoft's master servers not only would people like us not be buying the game, but normal people would return it to the shops because it "doesn't work"? Ubisoft would have a big commercial and media problem on their hands, hopefully so big that would cause them to re-think this strategy?

Or maybe they'll just blame the pirates for the down-time and use worse DRM next time? What would be worse than this though?

You're right, there is a big difference between the display device (Flash) and the content (the video).

"If any service is stopped, we will create a patch for the game so that the core game play will not be affected."

If Ubisoft can create an "offline" patch, then so can crackers, and I'll bet they do a better job of it too.

I didn't know that (evidently I wasn't off-line long enough to experience this), thanks for the info!

With Steam you can just use Offline mode. I did this when moving house and was without an Internet connection for a few weeks and could happily play Portal, HL2, etc. without any issues. (Not sure about other games which use non-Steam DRM though!)

Also should you want to format, it provides a way to back-up your games to a DVD/similar so you don't have to re-download.

I can't say anything about the other providers as I've never used them.

While that is true, and a good thing to remember, the phone was not claimed to be idiot-proof, nor would I call Dan Simmons an idiot (actually it was quite a smart move to whack the screen on the corner of the tank). So in this instance, that particular saying is not relevant.

It's strange, the human race have conquered the highest mountains on Earth, travelled through space, and explored the deepest oceans, yet making an unbreakable/unsinkable creation of our own? Seemingly impossible!

I too was playing on my Wii at midnight (Frisbee Golf!) but it's survived the year change, must be a bug on the Wii Menu!

Wait, what? How do you run VNC without a desktop or anything installed? What does VNC render if there's no desktop to show? I think there's obviously a piece of this pie I'm missing...

I may come across as a newbie, but I've been using VNC for years (admittedly mainly in a Windows environment), and have a fairly basic idea of X (had to learn about it to understand how Xming worked) but I have no idea how VNC could work without some kind of desktop running on the server to show to the client. If you can educate me, then I would really appreciate the lesson :o)

That's fine until you have to reboot and X refuses to start because there's no monitor attached, then you have to faff about making a VGA nully-thingy with resistors.

It still boils down to the fact that a back-end should not need a GUI in order to be configured. Imagine if you couldn't configure Apache without a GUI, or MySQL?

Yeah, I once tried to configure MythTV over the Internet from work, that was a fun experiment! I think it took about 30 minutes to render the first screen, lol.