Don't care really. Since the recovery partition usually contains the data needed to recover the hard drive to its bloated, choked and drowning in useless crap state, I'm better off without it. In fact that's where I store a local copy of my PING backup so I can recover my kid's computers when (not if...WHEN) they download something and really shag it up good and proper. And if the hard drive itself goes tits-up I still have my PING recovery DVD's I made as a backup

My bad. At the hospital we use Desktop PC's except for the areas where we need mobility and we use laptops on rolling carts and more recently the Pellham Sloane PC's on Howard Medical mobility carts with built-in batteries.

For those machines, we're using an application called Cerner which is a web-accessible, citrix application with the hosting computers (and all the data and the backups, and everything) located at the remote facility. So there is no need for the nurses and the doctors to have anything saved on those machines be they the desktops at the observation areas and nursing stations, or on the mobile units.

The administrators on the other hand need things like Office and have non-EPHI data stored on their local machines. We encourage placing the data on the RAID where it'll be protected and backed up...but some just do not and thanks to the administration, this is not something we can force.

Already using it at home and on the servers at the hopsital. It works, it works well, and it's free. Can't beat that with a stick.

This is why whenever I buy a computer or a laptop, the first thing that I do is to slick the damn thing and install the operating system as I see fit.

Whether this be Windows or some flavor of *nix, I just wipe out all the partitions and install from fresh.

I learned that lesson with an HP laptop I bought in 2005. No matter what I did, no matter what I uninstalled, I could not get more than 45% of my hard drive free.

I did a fresh load of XP and low and behold, I was only using 10% of the drive with Office, XP, my music files, a couple of games and my applications in my "Must Have" list.

Ever since, I do this on all of the ones at the hospital. I made a fresh load version for every configuration we have and I keep an image saved on our servers. Since we don't allow anything to be saved on the local computers that are on the hospital floors (our way of enforcing HIPPA on our electronically protected health information (EPHI)), this means that if someone sneaks online and lets slip in a virus, I can just wipe-restore from the network, run updates, and the computer is back in business in usually less than an hour. Less than 15 minutes in some cases.

For administration PC's, it's a bit longer. I have to backup their data first and then slick and reload. Then I have to put the data back. So that's more in the 30-90 minutes category.

And here are my reasons.

1. There is the fact that with most video games, we are forced in game to pay attention to everything that moves as it may be a threat. This is the case in First Person Shooters as well as driving games. In order to not get ganked by either the game's AI or by other players, we gamers need to learn spacial awareness and the ability to access and analyze anything that could potentially be a threat and/or opposition.

2. The Unites States Air Force frequently uses Microsoft Flight Simulator installed PC's in the dorms of trainee pilots. While it does nothing whatsoever for actual feel of the plane in flight, they have noticed that avid players of MSFS are often many hours ahead of "raw" pilots when it comes to simulator practice. It also is a great teaching aid for plotting courses since MSFS shoots for realism. If you're landing at LAX on Runway "X" in the game, it is going to look like and have the same landmarks as the real Runway "X" in the real world. Not to mention the flight paths, routings from airport to airport, fuel considerations, etc.

3. There is also the issue of getting out the pent up aggressions that one can develop on the real road. How many times has someone cut someone off and that person wishes that they could just gun the engine and ram that sonovabitch off of the overpass and into the path of an oncoming tractor trailer? God knows I've wished that many times myself. With the video games, you CAN. You can get your anger out by either firing up a FPS and blowing something away all the while imagining that it is the person who cut you off, you can fire up a road racing game and just randomly start slamming cars into a multi-car pile up of Brobdingnagian Proportions. You can even lose yourself in an RPG or a MMO game to let yourself de-stress and forget what was bothering you.

So my bet is for safer because of gaming.

Picking on a mentally disadvantaged child.

What's next? Stealing candy from babies? Stomping kittens in front of toddlers? Or how about an XBox Live message to all accounts under the age of 7 telling them that Santa Claus is dead because you killed him and sodomized his rapidly cooling corpse?

And just when I was starting to not dislike Microsoft as much as I used to.

While I do agree that the split-screen way of playing is getting a little dated. I know I've certainly never enjoyed playing that way (too distracting and hard to follow who is playing what some times and some games), I do not agree that we are seeing the end of the LAN party and face-to-face interaction while gaming.

My Tuesday night World of Warcraft gaming group is an example of that.

Every Tuesday, my wife and I and three of our friends meet at our house and we'll to Random Instances and general quests all the while having dinner, trading amusing anecdotes, showing off strange YouTube videos, etc.

And I'm not the only ones who do that. Many in my guild are clusters of friends who LAN party at their friends houses. There is the Texas Cluster, the Washington State cluster and there's us which is the Maryland cluster. We have the scattered ones, but that's 15 people (three groups of five) who enjoy an online game as a personal interactive experience with real people under the same roof.

So is it as dead or as dying as the article says, or is it in a state of evolution? A change into something a little different than we're traditionally used to?

And here is the biggest problem with dealing with anything that evolves. Someone or something else will come along and evolve a way to defeat it. This happens in the world of biological viruses and bacteria, this happens in the world of animals, this happens in the world of Electronic Viruses and Spyware, and this happens with encryption.

I remember when the contest was to crack either the 56-bit or the 64-bit (do not remember exactly which) and it was done in a matter of days and not the years it was thought of happening in.

I remember when 8 character alpha numeric passwords were thought to be enough to be secure.

My brother-in-law at the NSA who works on securing the Government's firewalls says that it is an uphill battle at best.

I can honestly say that none of the stories of anything getting cracked surprises me any more. It seems that it is not a question of "if" it can be cracked, but "when" and "how quickly".

Well if you put it together like that, you are correct. However if you'll read the article you'll notice that the battery cradles are

[ ]
[ ]

instead of [ ][ ]

And the terminal contacts as well as the internal circuitry will sort it out.

It's a nice idea and makes life simple, especially for the people who are baffled by the battery diagrams.

Since the Doctor suggested the Wii Fit, then I have no problems with the idea of the Government pay for the Wii Fit. If this were in the US, then I would agree that the Insurance company pay for it.

HOWEVER!

Since the Wii can be used for more than just the physical fitness applications, the Wii itself should not be paid for.

I would like to see a study done where my children are tossed into the mix.

First of all, all three have a very strong desire to read which I instilled into them thanks to bedtime stories, reading times, and the allowing of the children to stay up late if they weren't tired...provided that they were reading.

This didn't impact sleep as the most determined of them only made it 45 minutes as a record before sleep clubbed them like baby harp seals.

They also enjoy interactive past times such as Role Playing games. Granted the current kick at the moment is Car Wars (I still have my compendium and Uncle Albert's Catalog from Hell), but there is nothing more satisfying than seeing a bunch of children applying the math they learned figuring out how much armor they can mount on the car and how fast they can get it to go. But, even then they have to read the manuals, they laugh at the jokes and they're getting interested in GURPS ( I'm so proud) and that involves a lot of reading.

Sure they play video games, but unlike many parents, I do not let the PS3 or the Wii become the electronic babysitter. They get some time per child per day and on weekends when the weather is nasty as all heck they'll get more time on the video games...but I monitor and make sure that they do not become so sucked into the world of electrons that they do not enjoy the world beyond it.

So, I blame the parenting. The simple fact that so many parents allow their children to be raised by electrons is the real cause as to why the test scores are showing a difference between those with and those without. They need to run a third grouping of those with and with parental guidance.