I think you may be right; I never thought of it that way. Still, as you alluded to, the games were enjoyable despite their poor development.

Then of course there was Rygar. Ridiculously difficult and no save feature.

I'll second this. Good lord, I remember spending hours and hours getting thru Death Mountain to find the hammer. Then fighting, fighting, fighting thru that awful path that led to the final palace. Then trying in vain to beat that god damn blue/red Thunderbird (and failing, until 2002 when I could use an emulator and cheat codes). I finally got to see the ending, which was lame, but at least I finished the game.

I'll also second the comments about Ninja Gaiden, which, come to think of it, was much harder than even Zelda II. All the Ninja Gaiden games were great, but horrendously difficult to the point that I never finished any of them without a game genie.

As an IT worker, I found the show more depressing than funny. Too many similarities with my life and theirs.

Excellent explanation. Thank you.

Please explain.

The way I understand it:

Google drives by my house and sees a WPA2-protected wifi router. I guess they could get the MAC of the router if they want (right?). But that's all they can see.

When I go to a google.com from my wifi laptop at home, google sees the MAC of the laptop, but NOT the router. So how would they associate a physical location with a google user? They can see my external IP online, but they cannot see that by just wardriving. (Unless there's a way to also sniff the MAC of my laptop at the time of wardriving...now I'm paranoid.)

I don't get how they could associate the two things, unless I'm ignorant on the details here.

Agreed. This is a great song. I'm old enough to remember when it was popular on MTV. The title track from this album ("Whenever You Need Somebody") is even better.

Astley does have a great voice.

I'm obviously getting into the comments very late, but I felt the need to reply.

If you plan on replacing your nytimes.com reading with BBC News, you obviously have never read both of them. They are nothing alike. Whereas the BBC mainly reports strictly news (with an arguable anti-US spin that has grown tiresome to me), the NYTimes produces fantastic journalism. They have the best columnists and investigative reporters anywhere. Their travel and food sections are second to none. I also enjoy the tone of their writing -- it carries a more traditional, formal language than many newspapers these days.

I will watch with great interest how this plays out. I love my nytimes.com and would have to think hard about whether to pay for it.

Disagree.

I bet well over 90% of Palm users WOULD care if informed of this. It does not take a geek to understand that this is a serious invasion of privacy. I'd think most people would very clearly understand what is going on here.

This is a great idea for a movie. Alien vs Titanic!

This is nonsense. The contract fees are specifically designed to keep you from jumping ship. They don't want you moving to a competitor. They want to be able to abuse you as a consumer and they use the fee as a fear tactic. Jump ship and they still get a ton of money out of you.

It's anti-competitive, pure and simple.

Probably because AT&T offered the most money! It's all about money. Apple and AT&T are in business to MAKE MONEY. Private companies want to MAKE MONEY. Every decision they consider and every project they undertake is designed to MAKE MONEY.

Sorry, I'm not picking on you. Just irritated -- people stamp their feet when companies do things they don't like, forgetting of course that these companies are in business to MAKE BLOODY MONEY.

Why do you think Apple is so against replaceable batteries in their phones? Why don't they allow storage cards? It's about MONEY.

I disagree. Everyone knows murder is illegal; that's been well-established. What's going on in this trial isn't so clear-cut. This is a conflict of interest, without question.