If there's no climate change though then there's no extra damages to pay. If they believe firmly in climate change they weight it heavily in their predictive risk models, if they're certain that climate change is incorrect then they can ignore it in their predictions.

Either way it's going to hurt if you're wrong should other insurers have different predictions. If you think climate change will occur and it doesn't then those who predicted correctly will will been able to sell cheaper than you and you'll have needlessly lost market share, if you predict that it won't and it does then you've underestimated risk and will be paying out a lot more damages than you expected to when setting the price.

Blizzard's main priority with World of Warcraft is getting people to keep paying their subs, and to do this they make the game as engaging as possible. This goes against that by both managing to destroy the sense of immersion by dragging gamers out of their game world, and also by forming a link in the player's mind between Warcraft and real-world scenes of suffering. Not a connection that most players will want in their recreation time.

Where things may work better is where it's possible to both turn the work itself into a game, and also to wrap it in an appealing layer to stop it having too strong a connection in the player's mind with the reality behind it. An example of this would be the recent Facebook game developed to help identify some genetic factors in Ash tree dieback, as detailed in this BBC News story. Here the presentation is cute, and the focus is on making it a game. The only problem I could see here is that I can't see how it's cheaper/more efficient to develop and serve the entire content for even a simple game compared to just doing the pattern matching in a more traditional manner, but for other tasks I could see it working.

The basic idea is there though, make the work part of the game rather than making it a task which detracts from the game. Something which this story doesn't seem to recognise.

The Geonaute's for home/amateur use, the Omnicam is professional broadcast equipment- they're really not suitable replacements for one another. It's like comparing a GoPro Hero and a Red EPIC, both are digital video cameras, both are really nice pieces of kit, but there the similarities end.

Google have an interest in making money and if they happen to make the internet nicer at the same time then that's a nice side benefit. It it made things worse for internet users then they'd still want to do it but they wouldn't shout about it as much.

If you can only take so many years of being a running gag then can we look forward to Yahoo! pulling the plug on itself?

It's just following the new standard for punctuation.

I want a desktop OS on my desktop.

The only time I had a sysadmin hate me it was more due to me documenting their dangerous incompetence.

After a security hole was found in our multi-million daily users web application I was given a project to look into other potential security issues with the application. After trying SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other fun stuff I started to poke into the application server it was running on, and a quick read through the documentation told me how to get diagnostic information from the system- unless it's been disabled as part of the standard installation process. I try it on my dev server, and get the info- not a problem. I try it on the test server and it's the same. I then try the staging server, which should be a copy of the live service, and start to get scared.

After a quick chat with my manager as I wanted to be covered should the system flag me as an attacker I try it on the live service from an external IP address, again the diagnostics appear. I now had our database schema, the network architecture of the live service, and a lot of configuration details. My manager, who'd been watching over my shoulder as they'd become curious now, suggested we test this properly. I used my non-work mobile and called the sysadmin and, using only the details on screen, convinced him I was a database admin from elsewhere in the company working off-site. He was very helpful, I soon had a nicely unofficial SSH tunnel into the network set up for me, a temporary user account on all of the live servers, and root access to the live database with all of our customer details.

Oddly enough the sysadmin didn't think it fair that we'd 'tricked' him, and said that no one would normally see that information and think to do what I'd just done.

Most sysadmins I've worked with have been very good, and the in-department one I'm working with at the moment is absolutely amazing. It's not the case with all sysadmins though, some of them don't need users running random software as root to make things go stupid.

So I may be full of self-loathing but at least I'm effectively immortal.

Have a look at "To The Moon". The game mechanics are so sparse that without the narrative it wouldn't compare positively o a lot of Flash games, but when you add the need to see the story through to the end and the result is something pleasingly memorable.

I'll agree that a good game needs some level of gameplay, but that doesn't mean narrative should take a back seat to it. My personal favourite games tend to be those with very strong narrative even if they don't have exceptional gameplay, games such as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Planescape Torment, or the Fallout series. It's a matter of personal taste.

Computers can pick totally random numbers, they're called TRNGs (True Random Number Generator) it's a basic requirement of a lot of cryptographic systems as any bias significantly weakens the system. The example Tepples posted with the least significant bit of an audio source is one example, another common one is the thermal noise from measuring temperatures of internal components. If for some reason a machine needs a lot of random numbers, more than these common sources can provide in a given time, then there are actually radioactive decay based random number generators available for computers- set it so there's a 50% chance of a GM tube detecting a decay event in a given (short) time and enjoy some true quantum random numbers, or just have a lot of thermal noise sensors in a single device..

Have a look at any of the discussions about how /dev/random works, or have a read of Random.org

Humans on the other hand can't produce truly random behavior, or at least that's the result of most studies- both clinical and ad hoc. Have a look at Is 17 the most random number? where people were asked to pick a number between 1 and 20. Our brains may actually have a mechanism to choose a totally random outcome from a series of possibilities, there's a lot of uncertainty still on how the brain works at the most fundamental levels, but trying to consicously choose a random decision involves filtering through all of the personal and cultural biases into the conscious mind it's nowhere near random. "A number from one to twenty? Hmm. Eight. Hold on, no, I live at number eight, and have been thinking about going home. Must remember to buy milk. Twenty? Too obvious, it's the top and is a crit on a d20 in D&D, everyone'll choose that. Nineteen? Bah, only thinking of that because I can't use twenty. Thirteen? Well, it would show that I'm not superstitious but it's still too obvious. I'll go for seventeen, no one will choose that!"

That's already been started in 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/2728595.stm

In your example the coding and art are loosely coupled, it's easy to split them between different people. I suspect that if you knew programming but had no knowledge of 3d maths and there was a third person who knew 3d maths but not programming then you would have a lot more difficulty. Every minor piece of coding would result in a confused conversation where you don't have enough common domain knowledge to communicate effectively, misunderstandings will come in as assumptions are made on both sides, and problems will arise.

To be fair EA have already had a decent go at selling ads disguised as DLC, there's Sims 3 Stuff Packs for sale called 'Diesel Stuff' which has clothes and objects tied to the Diesel clothing brand, another tied to Ikea, and a really odd (and extra-expensive one) based on a tour by the singer Katy Perry.

This does surprise me. Although the deal has probably been in the pipeline for months I would have thought that Crest would have realised that SimCity is pretty much become a toxic brand at the moment and will taint everything associated with it. Pulling out from the deal, or convincing EA to move the deal to another game would have made a lot of sense.