Why? It's a temporary promotion that expires 31th July. After that they're most likely going to ask money for it again. Their game, their rules.

The promotion also ends 31st July, from what I read. After that they'll charge money again, I must presume.

Look to play it, you must run Windows, to run Windows means that you almost certainly have malware already. To me that makes it a non issue. Want to game? Have a Windows partition for that specifically and consider it "nukable-from-orbit". Do important stuff on sane platforms. That's how I see it, and as such, SecuROM is no big deal, even with the rather overblown claims of it being malware. It might be, and if it is, it's still no big deal as you isolate it from important things. At least slashdotters should, and normal people have malware regardless.

Yes, I don't get this. They give a game away for free and instead of saying "Fun! Thank you EA" many people are complaining about the DRM. Yes, there is DRM, but you're running Windows to play it, so that really is the least of your problems. I grabbed it. I don't even have Windows in active use, but should I ever have tons of free spare time and want to play a game, I can now install it on a Games-Dedicated-Windows partition.

I say "Thank you EA".

Why would you think that? I use it here for internal web apps, I don't care about their youporn visits and I don't want that on my network. So, if they're at home, let them connect to the VPN, access the internal apps and do their work and wank on the side using their own Internet connection.

I'd like to see an artificial organ developed that would directly convert excess blood sugar into electricity to charge electronics or for built in electric shock organs in the hands. It would turn being diabetic into an asset. You could charge up on sweets.

It could also be used to burn off the excess sugar as bio-luminescence to be the life of the party.

Yeah, as long as you ignore "NVidia Optimus". I have a AMD-A6 based desktop, it works fine with the occasional glitches, but the only thing that is truly stable and works for everything is called "Intel". There simply is no contest.

The Honda CRZ's steering changes depending on the drive mode selection. In sport mode it gets tighter for better handling, in normal and econ it has a soft feel to it.

Have you checked out VueScan? Works with an amazing range of scanners.

Others, because it still works and they have no reason to waste money on a new machine. I know at least two such people. Me? I have WinXP Pro in a Xen DomU, just in case I need something windowsy. It's always on, and I connect to it using RDP over an SSH tunnel. Sure, I rarely use it, but it's there should I need it and it's a better solution than having a XP VM on each of my Linux machines.

At work I have a Win7 VM in VirtualBox, it is horribly, horribly slow. The XP VM on the same VirtualBox host, is snappy and quick.

XP might be dead, but it's makes a rather well preserved zombie.

You can have all the laws of physics explain how things move etc, but how will they ever explain this consciousness?

May I introduce you to the concept of "argument from ignorance". It might be well that it can be perfectly explained by natural laws, just you and me are not (yet) able to.

I can't even prove beyond all doubt that others experience this phenomenon and are conscious. And I can't prove my consciousness to others. I just have to take it by faith that these "imaginary friends" called "you" and "I" exist.

If you go the solipsism route, nothing is certain any more. Even those physical laws you say explain how things move (etc), become totally uncertain in a solipsistic worldview. After all, it could all be just your mind and nothing truly exists.

I really think it will turn out that the big bang/big crunch is a constant process where the universe is shaped like a stretched torus or bar magnet and matter flows out the hole on one side across the surface and back into the hole on the other side constantly. The hole would likely be so small that it crunches matter down to energy as it flows thru to the other side. Since the universe appears to be expanding quicker we would likely be on the outflow side.

You don't know much about NZ government, then. So much for those assumptions of yours.

The TICS legislation was introduced as an exercise in ass-covering along with another bill which made illegal electronic surveillance performed by the GCSB "lawful" ex post facto. Both bills were overwhelmingly unpopular and submissions from the public and interest groups were practically unanimous against.

Several opinion polls have indicated that the majority of the NZ population disagree (many vehemently) with their government on these laws, and when they passed it was only with a one-vote majority in the Parliament courtesy of an MP who is the sole representative of his minor party (who himself only got into office because of a pre-election backroom deal with the National party). The best part of all this is that this deciding MP was himself under suspicion of leaking internal documents about illegal conduct by the GCSB, and that his email and that of the journalist he was corresponding with were snooped on in the process.

For a tiny little island nation we sure do have more than our fair share of idiot politicians and inept law enforcement. Not to mention a system of government whose relationship with democracy grows more tenuous by the year and which resembles a bunch of nice ideas thrown together without any guarantees, such as an immutable and entrenched Bill of Rights. The GCSB and TICS legislation have done considerable harm to the notion of privacy as a basic human right in this country with dragnet surveillance and full feed-through to the NSA of whatever gets picked up.

H1B is an excuse not to support higher education in the US. Many countries provide much lower cost education than the US. Rather than forcing the price of an education down in the US; companies are taking the easy route and importing skilled labor to force down the wage on formerly high paying positions. Too many times have people been forced to train H-1B holders as their replacements. Also some of those visa holders who are here for a limited time are being trained in the US so that they can go elsewhere to do the same job. It's also used to circumvent ITAR restrictions. If the work for some industries are done in the US it's ITAR restricted, if that job is exported its no longer ITAR restricted and they can send the info/work almost anywhere.

As far as your job not being exportable; you forget the world we live in. Online educations while not the norm will eventually surpass direct attendance at a university and it doesn't matter where the professor is on the planet with online education. The only thing that matters is a decent Internet connection. Scoring of tests and papers is already done online by people looking to make extra money on the side. For that matter the position of educator could easily automated using standardized programs and materials then computer scoring. It'll be done under the guise of not enough educators to fill the positions so we'll export the jobs then eventually computerize them. Meanwhile there be droves of former educators on the unemployment line.

Other countries protect the jobs for their citizens; the US need to do this also.