They're just pissed off that us Aussies are producing better wines than they are.

Just like only a board of audiophiles can tell me that that $3000 block of wood can make my CDs sound more 'danceable'.

Yeah, and what happens when that DLL gets updated due to a different vulnerability, but the app doesn't? You either get a broken app or one using an insecure library *anyway*.

Uh, so converting this organ into a boring old midi keyboard similar to what everyone already has is more awesome than making a unique instrument perfect for playing back old chiptune music?

I disagree.

Long distance travel is pretty easy; there is ample signage and you rarely have to make more than a few direction decisions along the way. It's dense urban routefinding that's the problem - you can potentially have to remember an incredible serpentine route with a turn every twenty seconds, all sorts of special-case turn restrictions, and no signs pointing the way to the specific place you're headed to.

If you deliberately exclude the discounts when evaluating Steam's prices, then you're missing the point. Unless someone is holding a gun to your head and making you buy every game at full price, there's nothing stopping you from stuffing your account full of AAA games at prices you just don't find anywhere else.

Sorry, but "All DRM is evil, period" is just plain wrong, and speaks to your prejudices more than anything else. Of course, it's perfectly understandable why you have those prejudices in the first place, considering how abusively the technology has been used by the entertainment industry, but still.

The issues with the first sale doctrine are valid - but honestly, the real reason people want to sell these items second-hand is to recover some of the punishing prices that the games are being sold for new. Valve goes some way to address this with the deep discounts they offer on a lot of their products. I don't buy a game unless a) I want it badly enough to justify swallowing the initial high price, or b) it gets discounted to where it's undeniably good value. Considering the ridiculously low prices Valve sells games for on a regular basis, I think this is perfectly acceptable.

The games that charge an obscene amount for little other reason than they can (*cough*MW2*cough*) don't find their way onto my account.

And "Steam is the most onerous DRM out there today" - hyperbole much? Not to mention it's just outright wrong. *cough*Ubisoft*cough*

Yep, much like the mobile phone industry - make the whole mess so utterly confusing that instead of picking an appropriate product that suits your budget, you're tricked into buying at an inflated price.

Strictly speaking it is DRM, but it's in a form that isn't about punishing the end user to make some high-rent manager with delusions of IP feel better.

"Presumably"? No, you're making a completely incorrect assumption. The black box doesn't just record 'throttle position', which is the output from the computer to the engine, it records each individual input, which includes pedal position and cruise control output.

Of course, the cruise control also drives a motor to give your foot feedback through the pedal as to where the cruise control is set, but don't fool yourself into thinking that means it doesn't know what the physical position of the pedal is too.

Brakes are a different beast, and (iirc) are never -by-wire devices, they're mechanically linked to the physical brake mechanism. Which is why your cruise control doesn't touch the brakes (except in the very newest cars with look-ahead radar). But the brake position is recorded too, and even if the car was designed by incompetents who couldn't distinguish the throttle inputs, it'd still be REALLY OBVIOUS that the brake pedal wasn't being pressed.

Watch out - remember they've almost figured out how to detect sarcasm in forum posts now!

http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/05/17/1541236/Software-Recognizes-Sarcastic-Tweets

Steal a car? Hell, I'd kill a policeman, steal his helmet, poop in it, give it to his widow, then steal it back again if it meant I'd never have to see that wretched thing again!

Looks like Sony ripped off the open-source Atlas Gloves (http://atlasgloves.org/) so they could get gesture control without bumping into Nintendo's patents.

Hah! The mp3 shuffle thing isn't a case of poor randomisation - humans just tend to pick a poor definition of random here. Usually people expect "play stuff I haven't heard recently, and in a completely new order that I haven't heard before". True random shuffle will give you songs and orders you've already heard, and your brain is good at picking them up.

Oh yeah, bring that up next time someone cries about the amount of mercury in a CFL. Incandescents have no mercury, but all the energy they use actually disperses MORE mercury into the environment around the coal-fired power plant than is *contained* in the CFL. Oops.