To be clear, he just means all games will have an MP component, not that all games will required to be played online. The 'always on DRM' is falling out of favour with developers (Ubi has backed out this practice over the past few months) for all the reasons gamers dislike it.

Stripped of the invective, AC is 100% correct - did you actually READ any of the articles above?

  In either story?

  The fact that the Gates Foundation can do more-or-less whatever it wants (Karl Rove is an even more egregious example) and deduct that from their taxes is a minor problem. The real problem is that they're using their combination of leveraged money and free P.R. from fools like you to take over vast quantities of [b]our tax dollars[/b] and redirect that money into their coffers and the coffers of their allies like Pearson Education, Murdoch, etc.

What on earth would a government be doing running a bureau of investigative journalism? Investigative journalism exists *precisely to* enhance the transparency of governments, companies, and individuals who don't want to be.

When I saw the question, my first thought was 'Back from the Dead machine! If I could bring back anyone...' which was immediately countered by 'No, no, no... A CLONING machine, moron.' Any clone I made would biologically be the identical twin of the person or animal I chose to clone, but would not be that same person. Their experiences and environmental factors would be wildly different.

Now, with that in mind, I began thinking about 'Well, who would I like to spend time with that I can't?'

I thought of my beloved tabby cat, who lived to be 15. I would enjoy spending another 15 years with an almost identical kitty, but I already have two younger cats I love dearly. I'd get more out of my time spending time with those guys.

My spouse? Why on earth would I want more than one? She's the jealous type and I'm not interested in any kind of polygamy or polyamory.

But we are childless. The opportunity to raise my spouse's identical twin as our child is actually quite attractive. I know that I'm compatible emotionally with my spouse, so the idea of raising a child guaranteed to be very similar to her is very interesting. If I had to chose, I think I'd go that route.

But, of course there *are* serious ethical issues. It's fun to think about, though.

Of course can know, you can just distribute the interpreter with the script.

It wasn't critically panned. (It's 80 at metacritic.) It's actually a pretty fun game.

Never mind that technically, it looks better than anything else out there, save for Crysis 2 and maybe BF3. Calling Carmack is a fossil is hilarious.

If you don't have anything informed to say, you could try saying nothing at all.

RTFA much? The coffin is not a mock funeral for the respective prime ministers, but rather for the 'death of science'.

you had me until you used the words "paradigm shift". ugh.

And it felt bad typing them. I asked myself, 'really, self? 'Paradigm shift?' WTF?'

But the words are used correctly in the sense that the paradigm of personal computing is shifting away from natively compiled applications running on desktop and laptop appliances to scripted applications running on handheld devices.

So I kept it.

Another strangely apropos paradigm shift... er... captcha: horrify

Of course there are many, many factors leading to the downfall of Microsoft. We've been reading about them for years as the 800 Pound Gorilla from Redmond has been slowly breaking its bones under its own weight.

Most people will point to the fact that Microsoft's failures have ensured that more people are using Linux worldwide than ever before... in the form of Android smartphones. MS *could* have had that market, but they continued to present shit products in the face of (at least perceived) quality goods from Apple and Google.

We've also heard in the last few days and weeks about how serious Valve is about getting their products to be 'Native' for Linux. We're going to see more of that, especially as more and more game designers want to develop for smart-phones.

Going forward, Microsoft's plans for smartphone development look pretty dismal. They're not even supporting their own technologies or frameworks, like Silverlight.

Ultimately, however, I think that shipping an WindowsME-bad desktop OS while this massive paradigm shift is happening is going to have long-reaching and long-lasting effects. Unlike when WinME shipped, there are some pretty darn good alternatives for development on both phones and PCs right now. When Win8 starts flopping around like a hooked carp, it's not going to be just the developers looking for an exit. It's going to be gamers and home-users as well. This time that exit is pretty darn visible.

And today is the day that flopping carp was hooked.

Captcha: resisted. How oddly apropos...

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. The 'pay as you go' is the important part.

Virgin Mobile is actually what I use for cell service, simply because Pay-as-you-go service nicely prevents any overcharge hijinks.

Choosing between Verizon, Sprint, and ATT is like choosing between Joe Jackson, Ike Turner, and O.J. Simpson.

Virgin Mobile is like Bobby Brown, holding to the terribly flawed analogy. You're gonna regret hooking up, but at least you can get away from it if you're not on crack.

Wait... You're leaving Verizon because they've treated you like complete crap and are going to either Sprint or ATT?

I mean, let's completely ignore for the moment how Apple treats their customers. Sprint or ATT? You SERIOUSLY think either of these guys will treat you better than Verizon?

This is cool, but as I read it here (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), it's no substitute for doing a real experiment. I'm going to launch into a long explanatory diatribe - models like this one can be VERY useful for hypothesis generation, or to try and understand seemingly disconnected results that (very often) arise in a biological experiment. They are especially useful when you have some hypothesis/theory of how a complex system is governed and you need to generate some prediction which you can experimentally test based on your theory.

  But not a substitute for the real experiment, no way no how. Why? Because living things aren't designed, and they don't respect your modularity, abstract data typing, etc. etc.

  For example, suppose your bacterium starts making some huge amount of a membrane protein (a common thing you do in the lab, for reasons outside the scope of this example). What's going to happen?

  Well, that protein is going to try and fold up in the membrane, but as you make more and more of it, the protein is going to fail to get there. Other proteins destined for the membrane are going to experience the same problem. Are you going to update every single module that contains something membrane bound, to reflect this? As they accumulate in the membrane, the membrane curvature is going to change, and this in turn is going to change the relative concentrations of various lipids on each leaf of the membrane, which alters the chemistry of everything that interacts with the membrane in any way (a whole bunch more modules.)

  Even if you have those effects covered, they're going to have indirect (and non-linear) effects on the concentration of various ions in the cytosol (all of which, just for starters, interact with the inner membrane with different affinities), the excess protein is going to start accumulating in inclusion bodies which are going to start taking up physical space inside the cell. These two changes alter the likelihood of interaction and the energy of interaction of every single other thing going on in the cell (!). So good luck with that.

  That's just one example. The same thing would happen if you sheared the DNA, or heat shocked the cell, or put the cell in an environment of rapidly changing nutrient concentrations. To put all that in CS terms - the actual cell isn't object oriented, there's all sorts of cross-talk between the different components (because they're physical objects in a little tiny soap bubble, they're bumping into each other) and no abstraction layer or anything of that kind.

  To be quite honest, I am of the opinion that a living cell is an irreducible system, and the only way you'd get a real substitute for experiments on actual cells would be JUST MAYBE if you ran a molecular dynamics simulation on all 10^14 or so atoms; and if you did so with a much better physics engine than we have now.