Battlefield was never a single-player game, so bad example. Oh, the first ones had a single player mode, but it was just a bot match on the regular multi-player maps. They shouldn't have even bothered with the single player "campaign" in BF3. The problem with the launch of BF3 was that they'd horribly under-provisioned Origin, which they still haven't learned from. I find it really bizarre that these companies don't make use of the abundant flexible computing resources available, and design their login servers, at least, to make use of them for rapid scaling - obviously it wouldn't make sense to build their permanent hosting system to deal with peak launch-day traffic, but it shouldn't be that hard to design it so they can temporarily run instances on AWS or whatever.

Of course, another problem was that they made it much more expensive to host a server for the game (compared to BF, BF2, etc.; I never played the Bad Company games, don't know about those), so there were also insufficient servers to play on, all of them concentrated with a few hosting companies that couldn't really handle the load (from what I've heard).

They already have processors that easily handle the processing aspect, so I don't think that's really it. No, this is actually aimed at improving the quality of the video recorded. When you use a whole bunch of tiny, high-sensitivity sensors, you get a lot of noise in low-light conditions. You just aren't getting enough photons hitting each sensor to create a good signal - highly variable, noisy images are the result. You can overcome this somewhat by averaging a bunch of sensors together, but you're basically averaging a bunch of known bad data in hopes of creating good data, and the outcome is often much less than satisfactory. This doesn't matter so much in still photography, where you can just keep the shutter open a little longer to collect more photons, but in video there are limits to how long you can open your shutter for each frame.

By using larger sensors, each one is intercepting a lot more photons and given the same sensitivity constraints it will create a much better signal. Anandtech recently did an article relating to this, although they were looking at cell phone cameras and one company that is deliberately decreasing MP in exchange for larger sensors in order to improve image quality for stills and video (though it is a presentation one of their writers gave, and doesn't go into a whole lot of the theory of why fewer, larger sensors can give better results than more, smaller sensors).

Well duh, everyone knows the CIA has been in a state of undeclared war with Australia for decades, and clearly the best way to bring Australia down is by protecting their environment. I mean, have you seen Australia's environment? I figure another decade, two tops, and the nation of Australia will crumble from within due to the unrelenting assault by their natural environment, and China will be free to sweep in and exploit their natural resources.

What, did you think the CIA was working for the U.S.? Sheep.

Oops, didn't realize university.edu was actually in use - trust a business school to buy up such a generic domain name. My earlier comment doesn't (as far as I know) actually apply to the actual university.edu.

At the university I previously studied at, they went through pretty much the same process when they decided that individual departments would no longer be permitted to have their own email domains. They set up a system to allow people transferring to the University-wide domain to specify their own name, with the limitation that it had to include at least one character from your first and last names (along with various other requirements). So if your name was John Smith, you could choose whether you wanted JohnSmith@university.edu or JSmith@university.edu or even ohmit@university.edu. Obviously your choices became more limited if there were other John Smiths at the university, but at least in that case you got to decide how to resolve it for your self. Presumably there was a list of banned strings, I'm not sure. In any case, I liked this solution because it allowed the user to decide what format they wanted to use and ensured that people were, in most cases, quite happy with their email address (though I'm sure some people with common names may have had some difficulty). After all, this is a university setting and there is no really convincing reason to make everyone use precisely the same format - standardizing on one format doesn't really gain you anything.

I usually don't use the area code when dialing a number within the same area code, so I'm fairly sure there's no requirement to use the area code. Of course, that's only for the handful of numbers I actually hand-dial rather than just picking from my list of contacts.

On another note - anyone know of a similar tool that lets you view the orbit/track in 3D? It would be cool to watch, and would give a much simpler to understand view of the eccentricity etc.

Looks like it is headed for S. Korea in about 10 minutes - this should be fun. Of course, it might have done that already and I just missed it; the orbit track only goes back about 1 orbit (~90 min).

Well, you kind of have to expect that possibility when you flee first world countries to avoid lawsuits/prison (the reason Mcaffee is in Belize in the first place).

But it still isn't really affected by air temperature. The tanker pulls its load from a very large above-ground tank that keeps a fairly stable temperature (a 40-90,000 barrel tank doesn't fluctuate very rapidly), which in turn is generally fed by underground pipeline from the refinery (where it was probably stored for a few weeks prior to delivery). Then the tanker drives it for perhaps a couple hours at most to your local station (maybe a little longer for very remote locations). Even on a hot day 8,000 gallons isn't going to warm up a whole lot in an hour or two, so you have relatively cool fuel going into the underground tank. Likely warmer than ground temperature a few feet down (so you're right, the temperature in the UST will fluctuate), but not really affected by ambient air temperature.

They aren't treated as special cases. The rules apply to any online applications, which includes pretty much all mobile apps. It's just that mobile app makers have been very poor at following the rules, likely because so many of them are small fly-by-night companies that don't have a legal department telling them what they are supposed to be doing. So 100 companies get notices that they need to have privacy policies posted, it gets splashed all over the news, and hopefully this will wake the others up to the fact that they need to be doing this just like the big boys.

I think you've kind of answered your own questions. $300-$350 for a console with the same power as consoles that have been out for five years (and that you can get for less). A focus on casual gamers for the previous console generation (or two), which doesn't exactly attract a lot of attention in the gaming world. A control scheme significantly different from the other main consoles, which means it will only really shine with games exclusive to that console - but a worrying lack of information on launch and first-party titles doesn't exactly instill confidence that there will be a decent library.

Now news that they are going to release an under-powered console, with a limited selection of games, at a loss. That doesn't exactly help me feel confident about the future of the console (or of Nintendo, for that matter). It will probably do just fine, but I don't really see much to get excited about. I know lots of people that bought a Wii, used it for a few months, and basically gave up on it because every game that was released that made use of the unique control scheme seemed to be more of a tech demo than a game. Maybe some really cool games did eventually come out, but if so it was long after interest had waned. The WiiU seems to be a repeat of that - interesting concept, great potential, but unless they have some full-fledged, finished games at launch that make good use of the controllers, it's not going to get much attention from the gaming community.

Not exactly prominently displayed on their website. You can find it, but only if you're looking for it.

That simply isn't true. The scientific group didn't say there was no risk, they said that the earthquake swarm did not mean a larger quake would happen. That doesn't mean a larger earthquake won't happen, just that the swarm isn't evidence that one will - there is a history in that area of minor earthquake swarms leading to nothing (with occasional exceptions). Of course, the bureaucrat mentioned did issue a statement that said there was nothing to worry about, so he at least deserves his sentence.

As for the safety of buildings in the area, the group pointed out that building construction was not sufficient to withstand a moderate earthquake. Unless the local government was willing to force everyone living in such a building to vacate for an unknown (and unknowable) period of time, there wasn't that much they could do about it other than say building codes needed to be more stringent.

The pay-what-you-want is actually only for 20 games, and you have to pay more than the average. The 32 games you get for $35. Just pointing that out, still a pretty good deal. Played Castles last night - exactly as I remembered it, incomprehensible. Might have to read the manual to remember how to get my idiots to actually start building; the music transported me directly back to 1991, though. Love that awesome midi sound.