I can see a similar phenomenon as people buying large HDTVs right before the Super Bowl and returning them on Monday, basically a 'free' rental. With games, I don't see anything but this becoming more common, due to the reduced difficulty of returning a game compared to a 50" television. Buy the game, burn through the single player in a weekend, then return the game claiming some inconsequential glitch. That's extra cost for the retailers dealing with returns and repackaging, and extra cost to the publishers if the retailers send the games back to them.

The only way to stop the system from being abused (so it can stay around for when it's needed) would be putting specific requirements on what can and can't be returned, but we all know how well our judicial system does that.

Well, it's obvious that he's not an engineer, so I can forgive him (somewhat).

Physical size, power density, weight, efficiency, maximum current, equivalent series resistance, number of charge/discharge cycles, and consumer regulations differ between the applications, and all have an effect on material and design costs. Of course the battery that's in use constantly with a small form factor will be more expensive in comparison to your lawnmower battery.

They accelerate through road friction. In a car, you exert a force on the road in the oposite direction that you are accelerating (Newton's Third Law). In space, where there is nothing to push against, generally you need to throw mass behind you such that the force on what you throw behind you is equal to your force forward.

This technique removes the need to carry mass to propel from the ship to balance the forces. Instead of energy going into stored propellant which is lost, the energy performs a reaction with the vaccuum to produce a net force against the ship with no loss of mass or propellant.

Actually, they do charge more for locations with a worse power factor. A lower power factor is caused by inductive loads, so you are charged extra for using too much inductive loading.

That said, it doesn't matter if this is caused by a large motor or what the motor is used for, which is how the ISPs would love to regulate. The utility companies also tell you up front what PF results in which charge, while the ISPs may not.

So, the utility companies are actually fantastic examples of neutrality. Limits are placed only due to load on the system (device agnostic) and are enumerated to customers. All the ISPs need to do is set their limits to be blind to final destination or device (if you throtle VoIP, you must treat your VoIP traffic and Vonage traffic the same) and the limits should be well described in writing to the customer. And, since utility companies are already a monopoly, a similar neutrality would probably work well.

It's also hardly ironic that a list of "games not to buy your children when they ask for them" would be populated by good games worth asking for. It's not like everyone's kids are asking for shitty games.

Anyone else think these are the worst possible alternatives? "My son asked for a fantasy RPG and a zombie apocalypse FPS, so I got him a 2D platformer and a 3rd person strategy game. I done good!"

I don't do anything that requires 802.11n speeds wirelessly, currently. My PC and XBox are wired Cat 5e, and I don't stream HD video to my Droid or eeePC. So I've been saving money using acceptable hardware, I do feel kewl!

Not if it requires a hardware purchase.

Within the academic community, you have the same problem in both of these cases: inability to repeat the experiment. With Cold Fusion, you can't get the same results when you follow the experimental procedure. That's failed science. With the global warming 'scandal', you have a few scientists who are the only ones with access to the raw temperature data. There is no independent analysis of the data, meaning the statistics (and released data) can be tweaked or cherry-picked until the authors get results they want. Without independent analysis repeating their results, that's failed science as well.

The issue is when other studies are based off of the 'groomed' data, rather than the raw measurements. We need to take their word that the data wasn't cherry-picked to seem hotter, and nobody can independently verify that it wasn't. That makes it easy to dismiss the findings, and makes it hell for those who want to study the phenomenon. It's too important not to verify.

The other problem is that a layperson (or even many scientists) wouldn't know if it was rigged or not. For the layperson, we see news articles that say "In a research paper published in Nature...", and nobody gets to read the paper. So the average person is told "take our word for it", which doesn't do much to combat rumors of poor science. Without people who are science-literate (though perhaps not PhD scientists) being able to read the paper, see that it is sound, and tell their non-scientific friends why, it will always appear like a bunch of hand-waving.

This article would beg to differ that they are the two most popular. However, the top two (FarmVille and Cafe World) do have clones (Farm Town and Restaurant City) at 8th and 9th places.

But can you blame them? FarmVille had 65.6 million active users in one month, I think a lot of devs would be just fine with only 1% of that, and a clone might be a simple way to get it.

Bad Astronomer has a good write-up, and he certainly knows his stuff. It's corroborated by a comment on the blog there as well:

Using CD-quality numbers, that comes to 600MB/hour. So about 6 hours of radio per day at that rate.

Assuming average overall, as well as including ambient radio stations (most restaurants and shopping malls) I can envision 6/hr a day of hearing the radio, even if it's not active listening.

I knew nobody RTFA, but I thought people at least read a short comment before replying.

Not internet use, all information/data. That's including possibly non-digital formats such as television, phone conversations, or print.

It seems they converted any information you consume to digital. For example, the headline "The New York Times" would be 18 bytes encoded as characters (assuming no byte packing). Television and audio (including radio and phone) were also measured, I assume by the size of the digital signals on the provider's backend.

TV was 45% of the overall data consumed per day, clocking in at 4.5 hours of watching. That's 34GB * 45% = 15.3GB of television. 15.3GB/4.5 hours = 3.4GB/hour => ~1MB/s => ~8Mbit/s. That's a fairly reasonable (and conservative) estimate, since compressed 720p is 20Mbit/s. I'd say 34GB/day overall is a reasonable number.

That's why it would fail, of course. But, putting out a $30 game and $30 of 'essential' DLC is what would happen in my candy-coated world. It still relies on a working DRM model for the DLC, though.