According to the gameplay video on the site linked in the summary, the game does have a persistent world. Check at the 1:03 mark, where the words "PERSISTENT WORLD" are plastered across the screen.

They measure the power at the wall and not on the CPU specifically, so there's no 'fraud' going on. Putting processing elements on the north bridge does nothing to gain this system an advantage. Reading the contest rules, they recommend power meters like this: http://www.brandelectronics.com/meters.html

Yes, but the sanity of our judges is canceled out by our ridiculous Human Rights Commissions. For example, it's a human right to not have to wash your hands while working at a restaurant, or get a better parking spot if you're morbidly obese.

In all seriousness, isn't the library of congress always growing? Is its growth rate significant enough that it's a very different size than it was in, say, the 1980s when we heard about hard disks that may someday be able to store an entire library of congress?

This article outlines the various circumstances under which hyperthreading either benefits or impedes performance. While it's true that on average the benefit was zero (meaning about half of what they tested was faster, and about half was slower) there are clearly a lot of applications that see significant performance gains.

It should also be noted that the applications that benefit are ones that would generally be used in Xeon (server and workstation) machines. Further, most of the applications that failed to benefit from hyperthreading are not written to take advantage of many (more than one or two) cores. As applications are updated for "many core" systems, it is likely that the benefit from hyperthreading will become more significant.

In any case, it is far from "established" that hyperthreading has "no benefit."

"Ice Time" is a very valuable commodity in Canada. People will drive for hours on a Sunday night just to get half an hour on the ice. The rink schedules are simply packed. I go to a "free skate" (basically just around the rink in a circle) for two hours on Sunday nights at 9pm. When we're walking out at 11pm, the hockey teams are taking to the ice for a game, which will take 2-3 hours to play.

I was talking to a parent at the free skate while they were resurfacing the ice (they resurface before and after the skate, and once in the middle) and he was saying that he would be back at 6am for his kid's hockey practice. 6am - 2am, resurfacing at least once an hour.

Frankly, I think the 12-15 times a day estimate was conservative, and that the number is probably closer to 20.

It's 12:21am, Jan 1, 2010 here and I got rickrolleded. I set my clock back a day, and got a white screen with a countdown.

I listen to classical symphonies, but I also find that listening to ballet (Swan Lake is a perfect, classic example) is even better than symphonies, because while there are technically more breaks in the music than a symphony, there tends to be a single narrative flow in a ballet.

What I mean is that in a symphony each movement has its own underlying theme, upon which variations are built. Ballet, on the other hand, tends to carry the same themes through the entire work (although often more than one - usually one for each major character).

I'm very easily distracted by sound and need to choose very carefully what I listen to when I need to concentrate. I always seem to come back to ballet.

I guess these older plants are still using Pentiums

There seems to be an overwhelming consensus here that Microsoft is trying to protect its interests by preventing piracy. This is, of course, true. However, someone above mentioned a mother buying a PS3 instead of an XBox 360 because she was concerned about the banning, etc. The argument then is that Microsoft loses revenue by scarying people away, while all the banned people continue to refuse to buy games. In other words, they see Microsoft taking a net loss on this.

However, aside from preventing piracy, Microsoft is trying to prevent cheating. People are throwing around a number like 99% of people are doing this to pirate games. However in my experience there are as many people who mod in order to cheat in multiplayer games as there are people who do it specifically to pirate. I'm sure that the cheaters ALSO pirate games, but for a large number of people it is not their primary goal.

Lots of gamers will be turned of XBox Live and buying 360 games in general if they encounter a large number of cheaters while playing online. I've encountered more than my fair share. Microsoft gains from protecting legitimate customers from cheaters, keeping those customers playing and buying new games (and XBL subscriptions).

What is involved in porting code to a new chip? I've done some programming in my life, but it has mostly been limited to personal interest and school projects. I imagine it can't be as simple as just recompiling. So what does it take to port code?What are the hurdles? Assume (accurately) that I'm a total noob.

Sony Online Entertainment

As a kid I remember the big catch phrases being acid rain, the ozone layer and, to a significantly lesser degree, global warming. I remember seeing pictures of perfect blue lakes where all the life had been killed off by acidification and being told that the hole in the ozone layer would mean that I'd need to wear SPF 8000 sunscreen when I grew up, unless we did something about it.

So far as I know we cleaned up emissions from cars and factories to combat acid rain, and it's been very effective. I'm not sure why anyone would've thought that scrubbing pollutants out of the air would affect global warming though. CO2 was never getting scrubbed out.

The air conditioner thing you're referring to had to do with CFCs, iirc. CFCs were the primary agent wrecking the ozone layer, punching holes in it over the Arctic and Australia, as well as other places (to lesser degrees).

Acid rain and ozone layer depletion were issues with proximate, easily identifiable and fixable causes. Rain pH, pollutant content and ozone layer thickness are all very easy to measure and demonstrate, compared to global warming. It's difficult to pretend that these are the result of natural oscillations in the climate.

Do you honestly believe the whole open source movement depends on people uniting around a hatred for Microsoft, as opposed to sharing a love for innovation and technology?

Sorry if that sounds kind if "hippy", but saying that the entire FOSS world is based around nothing but hatred for a particular corporation really cheapens the accomplishments of the people involved.

Unless I'm mistaken (and I very well may be) the code released is under the GPL, which seems to me to eliminate any worry about "licensing etc. issues", regardless of Microsoft's history.