Too bad I no longer have access to PSN since I refused to install the update that would have removed Linux support from my console, so I won't be able to use this premium subscription. Maybe I'm cynical, but I read "nothing planned will impact the service’s current free aspects" as "of course, any NEW multiplayer games you buy will be subject to the new 'premium' requirement to play online"... Sony does have a documented history of promising one thing and then doing exactly the opposite.

They are going to reboot it and it will solve the problem. Heck, just like Windows. If all the users I had to support would reboot their machine before calling half of them wouldn't need to call.

Of course, they refuse to learn that...

Quick someone tell me the difference between a life-saving drug with a prohibitively high price for ~10 years and no drug at all at any price...

> If every song made was available for $0.50 with a good client,
> guaranteed results and all that, there would be very little song piracy.

Even the full $1 that iTunes charges would be perfectly fine... if it was split only between Apple (for providing the service) and the artist (for producing the work). Over the last ten years or so the RIAA/metallica have shown beyond all doubt that they are contemptible, loathsome, and evil beyond redemption. I want to see them ruined.

Virtualization is supposed to CUT costs, not incur new hardware costs.

It's not even remotely uncommon for overall cost-cutting to require additional up front expenses.

I don't perceive any true elements to that statement. Are middle Americans driving over exotic flora and fauna in their SUV's by shortcutting through the 'glades to get their groceries quicker? Or are acres of rain forest being burned and cut down every day by subsistence farmers in financial straits where they have no other options?

Only a small portion of the world can really argue from the position of having comfort to sacrifice things over, and those are in virtually all cases not the portions of the population on the front lines of our encroachment against nature.

I am not trying to tell you that reversing this trend is impossible, but we should not kid ourselves what socially deep roots would need to be cut or rearranged in order to affect change. So why don't you start by illustrating what comfort you could conceivably give up that would give Brazilian farmers an alternative to deforestation? Hint: it's not buying a hybrid.

His Beaming is terrible; his augmentation dots are on the barline; his slurs are too thick; his accidentals too small. His note spacing sdoesn't look too hot either.

Donald Byrd, the leading exponent of notational algorithms, has shown that fully automated music notation is not possible without human-level artificial intelligence.

....still, I applaud his efforts as an early start.

There's no bright side to a basement. Especially if you have to pay rent.

Worrying about NASA's budget is like complaining an employee dropped a penny when someone walked off with a laptop, NASA's budget almost inconsequential. The three big entitlement/pork programs are Social Security, Medicare, and military, each roughly $600 billion a year. NASA? $17 Billion. You can axe NASA and sell it off clean and the needle on US deficit won't even twitch.

As it is, it looks like we're spending $1.8 trillion dollars this year solving (or maybe even causing) social problems in one form or another and the return on the money just isn't there compared to infrastructure and research. The problem is, people that advocate fiscal competence generally aren't elected. Maybe things will change after this year's elections, certain primaries have had surprising results lately.

And yet if prisoners were denied opportunities to work, you and your kind would be up front and center decrying the waste of manpower in prison, as well as the lack of job retraining skills for otherwise idle hands.

I don't know about the GP poster and "his kind", but the waste of manpower prison is a good thing: it provides an economic incentive to not lock people up. When locking me up means that you lose the tax dollars I pay, and have to provide me with room and board, you're only going to lock me up if I'm a threat. If by locking me up you get my skills for pennies on the dollar, there's a perverse incentive.

Job training does not imply selling the trainee's labor.

No, they only made the game run without CD.

How many wheels on a tricycle?
TrueKnowledge.com: 2
Fail.

http://www.trueknowledge.com/q/how_many_wheels_on_a_tricycle

Yeah, but even that supports the no-extinction point! "A third of the living creatures in the sea died" implies, of course, that two thirds did not.

We have been hitting peak oil since the 1970s according to 'experts'.