You could buy one of the simple Network Access Storage machines that sits on your home network. Most of them have a dynamic DNS service that comes with the purchase so that you can access your stored files from anywhere over https.

Evernote might be another good choice. You can store and access just about anything, and edit it on your phone with android or iOS.

It's one of the natures of advancing society for its educated to become more and more specialized in knowledge. To expect everyone to maintain the technical facility to maintain anonymous internet identities is just as ludicrous as it is for anyone who doesn't know how to raise and reap their own crops to starve.

I think critical mass will come when there is a cheap and colorful device that can capture the childrens' market. Right now, there is no way I would hand a $140 device to my 9-year-old to carry around and read with. It would be lost within days, long before he could break it.

The current B&W displays of the eInk readers don't catch his interest, anyway. He and I have checked out the Nook in stores, and he just shrugs and wants to head to the kids' section to browse. I can tell by watching him that it's a very personal, sensory experience to him. I can't see that transferring to a device right now. Apple is closest with the iPad, but the idea of handing that fragile and expensive tablet to my son is ludicrous. He'd be more interested in what games it played, play until he got bored, then would put it down and go grab his copy of Artemis Fowl.

I think it will take quite a while to convince parents and kids to switch over.

I'm in the same boat. Our home is humming with electronic media, but my 9-year-old is hooked on Rick Riordan's books. He carries one everywhere. I think kids realize there's no substitute for diving into the mind of a character through reading.

The real problem with low framerate is controller lag. I had a copy of Unreal Tournament 3 for my PS3, which had the amazing distinction of allowing you to use a compatible keyboard and mouse combo instead of the regular sixaxis controller. As a die-hard FPS gamer who had been resisting an expensive PC upgrade, this was welcome.

Unreal Tournament 3 for the PS3 is pegged at 30 FPS. The result when used with a kb+mouse was horrible controller lag. It was as if the view angle attached to the mouse was on rubber band that would stretch during a quick mouse move and then snap back into position.

When I tried the sixaxis, the controller lag wasn't noticable at all. My best guess at this was because the joystick-controlled view had a finite acceleration, rather than from any hardware lag. The keyboard, mouse and the sixaxis were all bluetooth connected. Using the same mouse on a PC game playing Quakelive showed no signs of lag. The sixaxis just isn't capable of the whiplash movements that a mouse is, so it couldn't show the same responsiveness issue.

The kb+mouse combo was still an advantage, but for a PC gamer, it was crippling to adjust to the laggy feel.

I'll have to try out some of the PC games that end up in the sub-30 FPS range to see if I can reproduce the same feel.

Coming so shortly after SNL's scathing "Not Done" skit, this has reduced the Nobel Peace Prize to little more than a Valentine's Day card for popular liberals. [i]"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the committee said.[cnn.com][/i] So, in the vacuum of people who have made real strides towards peace in the past year, the committee is going for someone who made the loudest promises. Brilliant.

Situation: Used games are selling like hotcakes; new games, not so much.

Publishers' Problem: Publishers want people to buy expensive, new games and keep them forever to keep them off the secondary market. (*cough*DeBeers*cough*)

Gamers' Problem: New games are expensive, and most AAA titles do not provide long-term interest.

Solution: Eliminate Publisher from the transaction. Steam, Sony and Microsoft figured this out ages ago. As internet connections and digital distribution become more ubiquitous, the consumers will resolve this situation themselves. Prices should be much lower and will make developers and gamers much happier.

I really need one more bureaucrat controlling my life. Rebranding them Czars must have played well in focus groups.

Cheers to Demigod's developers for their decision to go with no DRM. I've not even played the game, but I'm glad to hear that one of the things that pushed me to console gaming is seeing a sunset. DRM has, in the past, forced me to go to a piracy site to find a cracked .exe file that will remove the necessity of having the dvd in the drive. Even this light form of DRM pushes me towards piracy instead of just letting me enjoy my purchase without having to haul a small stack of "play disc"s around in my laptop bag. In the several years I've been separated from PC gaming, it sounds as if the problem has only gotten worse. Much of this leads me to believe that services like quakelive.com are getting a leg up on how games will be delivered in the future.

Some voicing their concerns about 3D ruining their enjoyment by giving viewers headaches or disorienting them with fading transitions, wipes and other common 2D movie tools need to understand that there are already techniques in place to remedy these problems.

First off, the new polarization techniques don't use the older, vertical/horizontal polarized light filters. Instead, clockwise/counterclockwise spiral polarization is used, resulting in less image bleed-over into each eye. Second, directors have the ability to lessen the perceived depth of a frame, making it seem not as if you are viewing reality, but more a bas relief sculpture. This helps during transitions or fast motion to keep people from getting headaches or experiencing vertigo. The recent film Monsters vs. Aliens used these variable depth shots quite a bit. I've had problems in the past myself with watching polarized 3D films, but have no problems watching any of the new 3D tech.

I'd say a much bigger concern is going to be how films done in 3D transition to DVD/bluray. If directors start shooting their films differently in order to take advantage of 3D imagery, how much intention will be lost when the film is converted to 2D? Imagine a director tweaks the depth of everything in a shot to lie in the far background, then pulls one particular item forward to emphasize its importance in the shot. Everything else considered equal, that information will be lost in the 2D version. It's a comparable problem to taking a color film and turning it into black and white. If "the girl with the red umbrella" suddenly becomes just some other person amidst a sea of other gray umbrellas, the meaning of the shot is lost.

Some newer TV's have 120hz refresh rates (or better) to allow for 60fps stereoscopic imaging when using shutter glasses, but that is hardware which is going to have a hard time making it into living rooms.

EmptyFlowerBed.rar -- Please seed. thx!

Mr. Blunt is just saying that instead we should all show our support and torrent our audiobooks from PirateBay.