Sony Online Entertainment

As a kid I remember the big catch phrases being acid rain, the ozone layer and, to a significantly lesser degree, global warming. I remember seeing pictures of perfect blue lakes where all the life had been killed off by acidification and being told that the hole in the ozone layer would mean that I'd need to wear SPF 8000 sunscreen when I grew up, unless we did something about it.

So far as I know we cleaned up emissions from cars and factories to combat acid rain, and it's been very effective. I'm not sure why anyone would've thought that scrubbing pollutants out of the air would affect global warming though. CO2 was never getting scrubbed out.

The air conditioner thing you're referring to had to do with CFCs, iirc. CFCs were the primary agent wrecking the ozone layer, punching holes in it over the Arctic and Australia, as well as other places (to lesser degrees).

Acid rain and ozone layer depletion were issues with proximate, easily identifiable and fixable causes. Rain pH, pollutant content and ozone layer thickness are all very easy to measure and demonstrate, compared to global warming. It's difficult to pretend that these are the result of natural oscillations in the climate.

Do you honestly believe the whole open source movement depends on people uniting around a hatred for Microsoft, as opposed to sharing a love for innovation and technology?

Sorry if that sounds kind if "hippy", but saying that the entire FOSS world is based around nothing but hatred for a particular corporation really cheapens the accomplishments of the people involved.

Unless I'm mistaken (and I very well may be) the code released is under the GPL, which seems to me to eliminate any worry about "licensing etc. issues", regardless of Microsoft's history.

Canadian Laws regarding "hate speech" have to do with inciting others to violence against any distinct group of people, whether they be gays, muslims or WASPs. Criticism in and of itself is not prohibited. For example:

"Go forth and kill all Pastafarians." This is iIllegal in both Canada and Ireland.

"All Pastafarians are idiots." This is legal in Canada, but illegal in Ireland.

IANAL and all that, but so far as I understand it, it is legal to criticize religious (or whatever) groups in Canada, but not legal to incite others to commit violence against them.

"in fact is MORE LIKELY to change if you start cooling water ahead of it"

Well, maybe we can't break up a storm, but diverting it away from a population center still sounds like a plus to me.

I do tend to agree that the number involved don't look particularly workable though.

Originally I was getting this message as well, which is why I called them in the first place. The techs told me that they were enabling the feature gradually (pushing some sort of update to the phone?) and that it would be available nationwide tomorrow (Friday).

I found this earlier today indicating that Rogers will allow anyone with a 1GB or greater data plan to tether. I called them to confirm and I am in fact allowed to consume bandwidth right up to my 6GB cap, same as if I was consuming the bandwidth on the phone itself.

The really surprising thing is that it's automatic. I didn't have to get them to turn anything on in my account. I simply turned it on in the Network Settings page and was able to tether my Windows 7 laptop and a friends Macbook Pro over both Bluetooth and USB without issues and, even more surprisingly, without iTunes installed (on the Win7 machine).

Bandwidth was around 3Mbps down and 0.3Mbps up, with a minimum ping of around 150ms, tested on multiple servers using Speedtest.net. This is in the middle of Halifax, NS.

"No, wait, Windows CE is 13 years old. It's had a little more time to design the window manager for different screen sizes."

While I agree with everything you've said here, and that the age of Windows CE makes the comparative shortcomings in Android somewhat excusable, it doesn't change the fact that Windows CE seems to do what NVidia wants and Android doesn't.

Android being new is a perfectly valid excuse, but in a here-and-now business sense Nvidia just has to go with what works... I guess.

Writing this is hurting me. I really, really hate Windows CE (or Windows Mobile or whatever they call it these days.)

I understand the point you're trying to make, but the question is a bit silly. While I acknowledge that this eliminates more physical disabilities from gameplay than traditional console designs, I don't think that a one-armed person could play, say, Halo on a normal XBox 360 controller either. Further, the much-loved Nintendo Wii has plenty of games that also require the Wii-mote attachment and therefore two hands, including Boxing which ships with the console (part of Wii Sports).

It is unfortunate that people with certain physical disabilities are being excluded from gaming by these new controller designs, but to suggest that game companies shouldn't innovate in this way lest some people be excluded by unfortunate circumstances sounds a lot like a Vonnegut short story to me.

We were required to have a "Cisco Clean Access Agent" installed on our machines. There were two options available for me, and I ended up going with the second.

1) The clean access agent only actually requires that you "authenticate" as clean to the network about once every two weeks. I installed a copy of Windows on a small partition at the end of my drive, put the clean access agent on it and authenticated myself. Whenever I was "cut off" from the network, I would reboot into the other (isolated) Windows partition (make sure your actual in-use partitions aren't mounted), do a scan to regain access and then reboot again. Worked reasonably well.

2) Because our network was so slow, I eventually decided that it wasn't worth the trouble. In the residence I was in the phones were provided by the local phone company and the cable was provided by the local cable company. It was a bit of a grey area regarding the policies in place in the residence, but I was able to have cable internet installed directly into my room. Perhaps you can do the same?

So far as I can tell, asus.co.uk is not Asus' UK website. If you go to asus.com and select the United Kingdom, you are sent to uk.asus.com.

The page you linked shows "asus.co.uk" in the address bar, yet if you go to "asus.co.uk" directly, you get redirected (as in "please wait while we redirect you") to uk.asus.com. I was unable to find this page on uk.asus.com. Furthermore, uk.asus.com is 66.238.93.162 while the page you linked (asus.co.uk) is hosted at 87.106.102.168.

A lookup on asus.co.uk shows that it is registered to Asustek, but it was updated very recently (May 22, 2009) and the nameservers are now at 1and1.co.uk (never heard of them).

Is it possible that someone has intercepted the domain in order to provide "proof" that the site in the summary is legitimate?

As someone who spends well above your $220 mark on any video card he buys, I agree with your scale. In reality, I could play through all the games I own (there are many, ranging from very low (Defcon) to very high (Crysis Warhead) demands) on a card costing far less than the one I currently own.

I do contest that I don't have any sense though, buying high end cards. (For the record, my current card is a Radeon 4870x2. I bought it used, if it helps.) Really, it's an issue of priorities. A person doesn't need 250hp in their card, or a 60" LCD to watch movies, or a 3000+ square foot house for a couple, or whatever. You can drive, watch movies and sleep at night with far more modest versions of those things. I take the bus, I have a small "home theater" (sort of) and I live in a relatively modest one-bedroom apartment with my girlfriend. I like playing games though - it's escapism. It isn't even just escapism - I'm awed by how powerful these system have become. I like tweaking my system for maximum performance. I like running games maxed out at 60fps, and then modifying them to push the visual quality up even higher.

I'm not saying that everyone should do what I do. I'm not saying what I do makes sense for most people. Almost everyone has a guilty pleasure though, into which they dump their disposable income. Mine is my computer. My girlfriend's is books and movies. I have friends that blow their extra cash on bars, or on clothes or on their car. Those are valid too. It's just a choice.

I'm not calling you out here, I don't think you meant to insult me or anyone else. I'm just... giving you the perspective of someone who likes high-end gaming hardware.

Actually, I don't. I'd love some PC-106000 RAM.

It's interesting that they say this actually. I'm a terrible chess player not because I don't 'get' the game, but because I'm not very patient. So I tend to do fairly well playing speed chess, but doing very, very poorly in a normal game. I tend to just get tired of evaluating the possible moves after a while and just make whatever one was the most promising out of the few that I did think about.

Isn't that sort of the same thing as limiting the number of calculations? In this case limiting the calculations would replicate the stupid moves that I (as a human/meat popsicle) would make, assuming that the order in which the computer evaluated possible moves was decided using more or less the same set or priorities that I would use (which are also probably stupid).

So the trick to coming up with a "realistic" AI opponent for chess might be more about figuring out how a human surveys the board and in what order they evaluate the moves. You can replicate the behaviour of dumb humans (like me) just by cutting off the evaluation at some very early point and scale up the difficulty by extending it.