Even Microsoft paid tribute today. The daily image for October 6th at Bing.com was Castle Stalker in Loch Linnhe, aka "Castle Arrrrgh," where Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail ends. http://www.bing.com/reference

Erm, so MS would instead give out a stub program that people download in ten second and then launches, which then downloads, in the background, the ISO, and when it's downloaded burns it to a CD.

Of course, it should first check to make sure there's a CD-R in the system, and possibly even make people insert a blank CD to prove they have one. (So some fool doesn't try to use an AOL CD.)

Of course, for experts, they could have a torrent with just the ISO. (Or even use a torrent system in their downloader, and just let other people access it directly.)

It's not rocket science.

Waste of time, money and reputation.

The Wii is a casual - family-oriented - gaming platform. Wii Fit an instant hit among young women.

This is how Nintendo builds its reputation and sales and it needs the modder about as much as a car needs a fifth wheel.

The geek has no sense of scale.

His place in the overall scheme of things.

Of course, when one can drive a big comfortable car full of their family for 1000 miles and only spend 1/4 the cost they would now... I suspect that many people will drive rather than take mass transit for longer trips.

Sure trains and planes are great for trips, however the more people you bring the greater the cost. When I vacation with my kids we almost always drive for exactly this reason. Here in the US a flight to my wife's home state of Florida is about $300 per person (more near holidays). So for $1200 plus the cost of a rental car, we can fly. For about $400 we can drive, sure it takes a couple of days off the vacation time, but $800+ in savings is worth the "lost" time driving. If that $300 drops by 75% and only costs me $75... I don't suspect I would even bother to check the cost of the flight.

If it only holds 250 pages or less, that is a sign it isn't meant to be used much.

Yes, it will cost you more, but it will last.

Voice on the Go

Great, common sense wins for once. If the cops really need to track someone, they can still do so. It only takes a short period of time to ask a judge to sign a warrant. If a judge isn't willing to sign the warrant, then the cops have no case, simple as that. Lazy cops who would rather rely on technology instead of "police work" have no business being a cop.

we are so accustomed to the idea that throwing more technology at a problem solves it better, that sometimes we miss genuine real world situations where the technological solution to the problem has peaked, and further application of current technology makes things WORSE, not better

voting, for one: all voting should be done on paper ballot. electronic, or heck, even mechanical voting, is simply more expensive and results in more attack vectors for election night shenanigans. so you spend more money on more technology and you wind up with less faith in your democracy and your government

ebook readers like kindle: i'm sorry, but paperback, wood pulp, is pretty much the bomb when it comes to reading large texts. there are lots of edge conditions: low lighting, etc., where ebooks come out ahead, but when you throw in durability, batteries, price, etc., wood pulp comes out ahead overall in the positives and negatives

i'm sure there are more examples

something like the automobile is clearly better than the horse. something like the gun is clearly better than the bow and arrow. but there exists higher technological solutions to problems that are of less quality than lower tech solutions in this world, and our technophilia interferes with our ability to see that sometimes

Wow, that doesn't sound like an optimistic outlook for a smooth landing of their craft.

It reminds me of a line I like to use on women: Baby, by the third date I'll be thoroughly disappointing you in bed.

I always just highlighted the completely irrelevant passages of the books. Then re-sold them. Nothing more entertaining than messing with the heads of students.

It is solved, it's just that USA is held back by a braindead telecom-structure, this is political barrier not a technological one.

Here in Norway, I've got 4-5 different technologies to choose from, that all trump what you've got. First there's ADSL and ADSL2, the former ain't much better than what you've got, stopping at around 2M/512kbit, but ADSL2 is available up to something like 10M/1M, which is already a significant improvement.

With similar speed, there's mobile broadband, 2-3Mbps download and 500kbps upload, it's got worse latency though so no good for gaming. (but nice in working also when you're traveling)

Then there's internet-over-coax, i.e. alongside cable-tv, this offers speeds up to 50Mbps, though the most popular offering is 3.5 or 7Mbps.

And if none of that will satisfy you, get fibre-to-the-basement with physical capacity for several Gbit/s, but actually offering internet-speeds of up to 100M/100M (i.e. symetrical) to private homes at the moment, the lack of higher speeds offerings if from lack of demand though, not because of any technological restrictions on the last mile.

Most people settle for something in the 3M to 10M range, though, I've got fibre, and that's the most popular solution, but even a 2-nerd household like mine don't really have a reason for more than 25M/25M, so that's what we have.

The same technologies would work fine in USA too -- if only the political barriers of the entrenched telecom-monopolies where removed.

Yes, it is, because the car still functions 100% correctly without those unnecessary options. GM doesn't build a Camaro and then the dealer pulls the engine and charges you to have it reinstalled.

Install it with the quicktime alternative and without all the crap. Linky from my post earlier -> These guys have been doing just that for ages.

One other system used more prevalently is the simple locking screen saver. The idea is only the user, and sysadmin have the password to unlock the screen, and access through the system is prohibited until the screen saver password is entered. I'm not a fan of this, as generally screen-saver passwords are more-often assigned by the users themselves, and so are easier to guess than the back-end passwords which on occasion are set by the site, or by the sysadmin in the case of accessing corporate systems via corporate-policy. Now a minor, but important distinction. This isn't "un-authentication" this is de-authorizing the computer from which you're logged in accessing the place you're logged in to. You want to "authenticate a de-authorization" that is verify that you are the person removing access privileges. If the system doesn't require authentication to de-authorize access, then a denial of service attack is made (somewhat) trivial, and if more thought process went into understanding the difference I think more places would realize how serious the solution needs to be.