I don't believe pirates are likely to even be playing multiplayer in the first place. Everything is tied into Steam this time around, even for those who bought the box off the shelf.

In-game currencies are commonly traded for real-world cash. Right now it looks like 200 billion ISK is worth about US$8000.

If you actually read the filing with the FCC, you'd find that so long as the overall bandwidth limit at the the CMTS are not exceeded, a user can use 100% of his provisioned bandwidth indefinitely. It is ONLY after network congestion reaches its limit that the system searches for high-usage users and moves them to a lower priority.

The summary and TFA incorrectly state that when EITHER condition is met, a user's connection will be throttled, when actually BOTH conditions need to be true.

Also, TFA is from January 2009...

The iPhone definitely expands the (Things I can do):(Things in my pockets) ratio by an order of magnitude or two, but I don't think it will ever deliver the same kind of gaming experience as a DS or PSP. Maybe it's my dislike for EA or my refusal to pay +$10 for a game when there are so many thousands of options in the $0-$1.99 range, but it seems like games approaching the sort of quality we take for granted on a DS are few and far between.

I'll never carry a DS because, as you said, the iPhone is good enough to kill some time on the bus or standing in line. But after a long day of texting, facebook, internet browsing, phone calls, etc., etc., if you fire up a 3D game like minigore or dungeon hunter you can almost hear the battery scream. While the accelerometer and multi-touch screen allow quite a bit of flexibility, sometimes you just can't beat a D-pad and a couple of real buttons.

In spite of the convenience of the one-device-to-rule-them-all, I think there will always be a market for some sort of game-centric portable device.

I merged my account as soon as I could to take advantage of the authenticator app for the iphone. The first week or so there were some connection issues once in a while, but they worked the kinks out and it's been smooth as butter for many months.

The only difference now is that your login is your full email address instead of an arbitrary user name.

About a year ago, I was asked to be the guinea pig and test out all our engineering applications in Vista. I immediately cringed at the thought of running our 3D Solid Modeling software in the new OS.

My fears were quickly put to rest though. It turns out Solidworks ran flawlessly, and turned out to be far more stable than it was in XP64. Additionally, I found that it would start in a fraction of the time every morning, and I was no longer subjected to 5 minutes of hard disk grinding if I left the application open when I went to lunch. AutoCAD and our 8 year old ERP software had no issues, either. I make frequent use of the improved search features to find a particular drawing or part file lost in a sea of many thousands of engineering files and directories across a network in a couple of seconds.

Today, our entire department is on Vista. Given the opportunity, would we go back to XP? Not a chance.

Just yesterday I called to inquire about acquiring another HD cable box for a new TV in my home. They quoted me an approximate $5/mo. to lease the additional box. When I went to pick it up they told me the lease on the FIRST box is $5 and each additional is $15/mo. Then they told me I needed to have a technician come out and run a new cable because connecting to the same line that my cable modem is on wouldn't work.

I explained to them that they weren't dealing with your average garden variety mindless idiot, and that I'd like to cancel my service. At that point they offered me the additional box at the $5/mo originally quoted, and knocked an additional $20/mo off my bill to keep me as a customer.

I guess the moral of the story is that they love to prey on the stupid but are quick to change their tune when you call them out on it.

When the Google Deathbot (Beta) robotic army goes berserk and attempts to wipe its creators off the face of the planet, the last thing you'll be worried about is how you accessed your reading material.

During the murky period between earning my degree and finding a real people job, I spent some time as a computer salesman at a big-box electronics retailer.

I often found myself in a position where I not only had to accept a customer's ignorance, but also had to go along with it as if they knew what they were talking about. Correcting a customer, no matter how polite you are, makes them feel stupid and less likely to buy from you.

I sold a great many systems by avoiding any sort of discussion regarding the guts of a particular PC at all, instead opting to figure out what they were planning on doing with it and pointing out several systems that would just get the job done.

Try taking your Linux box down to your local Geek Squad desk and watching the kid behind the counter squirm as you explain that GDM fails to start, leaving you at a console login prompt.

2GB ASCII art would seem pretty suspicious to me.