I agree with the points you make about video games, their 'effect' on violence and their use as scapegoats. However, the program IS (well, would have been) voluntary and could potentially serve as a resource for parents of younger children who don't, for some reason or another, feel comfortable with their (non teenage) kids playing violent stuff. I'm simply trying to point out the hypocrisy of the NRA calling for a program like this one while lambasting voluntary gun buyback programs. I find it hilarious that they're making the same points about the 'video game scourge' in support of a program like this one, while fighting those exact same arguments made in favor of gun control.

I hadn't considered that angle...I appreciate the food for thought.

I can't really take issue with the program as they would have implemented it. It's a voluntary program, the person with the game is reimbursed for the game, and the game is destroyed. It's stated up front, everybody knows what the endgame is. At the end of the day, it sounds just like a sponsored gun buyback program. I wouldn't take my games personally, but at the end of the day it's a good potential resource for concerned parents out there. If the NRA is willing to sponsor a program like this one, I fail to see why they'd be protesting a gun buyback program in Tucson (http://www.npr.org/2013/01/09/168926749/nra-vows-to-stop-tuscon-from-destroying-guns).

I decided to do some hunting and found some good testing done by MacWorld. Link: http://www.macworld.com/article/2010286/lab-tests-ios-6-and-ios-5-performance-differences.html

Their testing seems to show flat or slightly better performance on an iPhone 4 running iOS 5.1.1 vs iOS 6.0. If there's any code designed to slow the older devices down, Geekbench, Javascript and HTML5 benchmark tests can't find it.

Have a source for that one? It's news to me and I'll hold off on upgrading to iOS 6 on my iPhone 4 if that is indeed the case.

They may be loosely related NOW, but one could predict that there might be a crossing of plot-arcs in HL3. Episode 2 seems to imply that players will soon be visiting the Borealis, which may or may not contain a trip to a testing chamber of some kind. Will we meet GlaDOS? Probably not. But if I had to guess, I'd think that we'll be seeing a lot more than references to Aperture Science in Half Life 3.

Mod parent up, please.

You make a good point. Other sources are picking up the story, but they all come back to Gizmodo. Can it be? Did Gawker *gasp* actually get a scoop on something?

Had to pay for a stamp, and didn't get a sticker.

Other than the possibility of naming the rat Ben and using it to take out their boss, I don't see what could possibly go wrong.

Yeah, I'm aware that the metadata sometimes requires a re-write. However, I've never had such long delays when using other tagging software (I experimented with some Share/Payware about a year ago, in my Great Music Organization project; I properly organized and tagged about 120GB worth of music using a few different applications). I know that some time is needed to write to file, and that's a fact of life, but I've seen programs do similar write-outs much faster than in iTunes. It's not a huge issue, as I tend to only have to work with the metadata from the odd song or album these days.

Even on OS X, iTunes was pretty laggy. Apple made major strides in usability when they gave iTunes the 64-bit treatment for the release of OS X 10.7. I'm looking forward to seeing if iTunes 11 improves on this. Metadata changes on even one album's worth of songs are still quite laggy; if they fix the performance lag regarding operations that involve altering metadata, I'll be quite happy.

http://xkcd.com/678/

My understanding is that it's only about a Library of Congress in size.

Thanks, Linus, for taking the time to sit down and write up some in-depth, thoughtful answers. I, for one, enjoyed the answer regarding CPU design.