I assume that while Halo3 probably runs matches on one of the clients, rather than running a server, the lobby/game searching feature is probably centralized.

Thus they don't have to monitor anything except some count made by the lobby server that keeps track of how many game match-ups it creates that get played.

So like McDonalds can check receipts, I'm sure MS can check server logs, and probably this is automated for them.

Oblig. Link: http://www.sex-panther.com/thescience.html

Dead Space is not really a horror game at all. At best a couple startling parts maybe. Swarm attacks in a couple spots. It's no Silent Hill 1 or even RE1. It sorta played like RE4, I guess, with the highlight being stomping off limbs and heads of dead bodies.

Good game, don't get me wrong, but marketing it as survival horror is imo not correct.

Lots of software products already do the URL to EULA on box routine. PC games are relatively commonly inundated with that phrasing about the license terms being available on some website. Usually the games that warn you that they contain technology that interferes with gam eplay if you have any form of CD/DVD drive emulation software.

Write caching aside though, I think most SATA drives 'support' hot swapping, so if one were to disable write caching, wouldn't there be no danger of corruption unless they were switched during an actual write?

Wouldn't be very practical for a boot drive, but you could 'hide' a porn drive from the wife/kids...

Probably right. Stock Xbox had 733mhz celeron I think and was fine for any SD divx/xvid I threw at it via xbmc. any x264/h264 and it stuttered though.

Does it have vga/dvi/hdmi/composite/whatever display output though? Or just terminal/ssh/vnc type interface? Summary didn't say :/

I doubt that MS would change anything. They'd probably rather keep paying fines while ignoring the EU ruling.

When I used to play EQ in college, I was in a guild based in hong kong, and they always said AFK in place of IRL, when describing out of game meetings. Though in their case, I think it was language barrier, rather than trying to be clever.

call it Wikipedophilia, where anyone can weigh in their opinion if an image/site should be classified as cp.

Who exactly is going to be willing to eat produce grown in a smog cloud? I doubt people will eat that food just because it was grown in the city, so it won't really sustain the city. It is unlikely ever to be cheaper to produce food there than in foreign fields.

If you have intent to use it for burglary, possession of a crow bar is illegal, as it then is classified as a burglary tool and possession gets added to your charges. Assuming of course they could charge you with burglary or infer intent somehow in the first place, it just adds another charge.

It's just called Classic Doom, it was released in '05 but got a patch a while ago to work with the Steam version of D3. If you have the game via steam, it's probably available via Steam.

Otherwise check filefront, or this link http://doom3.filefront.com/file/Classic_Doom_3_ZIP;83549

I know it works in WinXP and linux versions of Doom 3 from my CD with the latest patches. It is pretty cool. The soundtrack is available free from ocremix.org, search for dark side of phobos. Should be available as mp3, wav, and flac.

You've probably tried it, but there was a Doom 3 mod that had all the maps from Doom's Episode 1, along with some pretty kickass versions of the music. I think really that mod was better than the rest of the Doom 3 game itself.

Id should have cashed in on that, hired those guys to do the other Doom episodes and convert Doom II/Heretic/Hexen into Doom 3 engine mods. I would have rather bought that than Doom 3. Though for the record, while I agree it is silly that there is apparently no duct tape on Mars and no way to mount a light onto a gun in the space traveling future, I disagree with modding the game to put the flashlight on all the guns, as it made the game too easy on the second run.

If they do Starter Edition again, I agree that it is unlikely to be targeted to or even released in the US. Even excluding AV/Firewall apps from this completely fucktarded 3 app limit, I'd imagine that the group of people in the US getting computers from OEMs like Dell, particularly laptops, could include a sizeable amount of high school and college age people.

These people are very likely to use media player, a web browser, and MS Word simultaneously all the time. a 3 app limit is completely bonkers. They may also want to run background apps like AIM, Skype, Bittorrent, email client (If they don't just use gmail web interface), etc etc.

Restricting the main stream Windows would be epic fail for MS in that kind of market. If it really is targeted as the generic OEM version like Vista Home/XP Home is now, it should support at least 5 or 6 concurrent apps so students don't have to close AIM to write a paper, or ever have to choose between totally normal behaviour or restricted crap like that. It'll just drive up piracy of WinXP even more, or drive up support calls and angry customers.