Well, the restrictions really don't matter cause all communications to/from the President must be recorded and be made available. Bush Jr gave up on his personal email (it was an aol account) when he became president cause he didn't want to have to disclose private information. Obama's BB will be under similar restrictions. Whatever BES he's attached to probably has all sorts of ridiculous auditing and filtering stuff turned on for his account. It's very much going to be 'boring' work phone.

Blizzard usually doesn't go for the latest and greatest graphics. If you look at screenshots of SC2, it's using graphics that are technically a few years old. As in a video card from 06 could render it with no problem.

Whatever money blizzards dumps into their graphics, its into the art, not into trying to cram more polygons on screen.

Because this isn't meant for use in North America at all. There are places in the world where all they have is base GSM without GPRS. Or as another poster pointed out, you could have whacked out data pricing schemes.

The intended use of this is for once a day updates of information to locations with poor internet connectivity. These people weren't pulling in high data to begin with, and likely were sending even less. For example, if all you need to do is send crop prices, weather reports, etc that update once a day, then you can just push all that data once a day over SMS.

Beyond that, as a student currently at Waterloo, I'm fairly certain that this PhD student, some prof, or some other smart ass student (there are a LOT of those here) probably already considered the problem of congestion. And they probably worked out acceptable loads, or solutions, or w/e.

Not like no country is the free world is evil enough to ban porn for children right? Right?

Get a grip guys. China may do some horrible/stupid things. But this is overblowing things. We have laws preventing commercial entities from selling certain products/services to people underage in north america (and most of the industrial world). We have laws making underage possession of said entities illegal for fuck's sake, and we've all gone out and made arguments based on children's lack of education/inability to take responsibility of themselves, and then went and ahead and accepted the unfortunate coarseness of age based laws.

So don't go out and bash the fuck out of China for this. Yes, they are controlling the Chinese children's freedom. Just like how I wasn't able to buy my own booze when I was 16. There are better things to criticize China for.

For many games, the "official" content has nothing to do with the best or flashiest plays. Starcraft comes to mind. Blizzard has nothing to do with nearly all high level play. Hell, all high level play specifically by passes Bnet ladder. The closest Blizzard comes to 'claiming' any high level play is the yearly Blizzcon tournament. Which is something that very few game companies have the size and clout to pull off.

Really, the thing is lack of centralization. Aside from MMORPGs, game companies won't be able to directly see what the players are doing. They would have to rely on player submissions, which really boils down to youtube again. They could sponsor/host events more often (which I think is a great idea), but once again, there are few companies that have that kind of rapport with their communities for them to be taken seriously. And being taken seriously is pretty much key for 'good' players to show up and show off 'awesome' plays.

Finally, just doing that is a lot of work. It really is. It really is easier for most companies to let their fans upload their killtages and epic matches on youtube by themselves, and maybe comment on them every so often. I mean, that's what Bungie did with Halo. They gave the community the tools, and the community (and MLG) took care of the rest. All Frankie had to do was link to random videos every so often in weekly updates.

It doesn't seem like its the technicians who are forcing this through. TFA says it was the management who decided it was a good idea to "ease pressure". Which probably meant that the techies were feeling overworked (they probably are overworked) and complained (not really expecting something like THIS to happen). And instead of doing anything constructive (or maybe they're just all out of money), the management went for some crazy ass stupid idea that somehow past muster.

Pointy Head Boss eh? IT isn't the only place where they exist.

TFA says that the rice additive has been used since the Ming Dynasty... and then goes on to say 1500 years ago. Ming Dynasty ruled around 1500 AD. They got themselves a 1000 year discrepancy there. Would sure be nice if they were more accurate about what they meant.

The XT was pretty much made for laptops. It's really the only place where getting a true hybrid (as opposed to HDD + SSD) really makes sense.

For the XT, the SSD works as a read cache, and read cache only. You're only going to be seeing performance increases on whatever it has cached (4gigs). So if you have a few frequently used programs with long startup times, you'll see more than 'a couple of percent' better. And that's about it.

Hybrid drives will always be the compromise between HDD and SSD. You will never see them performing on the same order of performance as SSD across the board unless the SSD component becomes huge.

No. That was a modified measles virus to eradicate cancer cells.

They aren't getting the info without the permission. It's an opt in feature.

Early cold war devices were in the 25MT range. By the late 70s and 80s they were mostly back to using kT range warheads. Just more of them. And more likely to actually hit the damn target.

GPS accuracy isn't that bad. Ground based Differential GPS has an absolute worse case accuracy of 10m lateral/vertical.

They've done this numerous times in the past. Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Recon Orbiter, etc etc. If its a good idea, or would even work (from a power perspective) is different, but putting the satellites in orbit is doable. Infact, I suspect it's easier than actually landing the rovers. Not having to do all the breaking and stuff. Hell, I would think (can't confirm it anywhere), whenever you send payload over to Mars, you're going to go into a Mars orbit first before deorbiting onto the surface. So a single rocket could send the power sat, and the rover together.

Look, using non-metallic parts/coating may work. But seriously, I think some people are overblowing the difficulty of salt water turbines. I mean, most ships today are turbine powered... it's basically a floating turbine generator backwards. It's an added design constraint, but it's a solvable (and largely solved) problem I would think. I mean, the Bay of Fundy already has a barrage style tidal plant operating. And the Atlantic on our side is more or less as salty as the Atlantic on the other side.

The bigger problem is just how little power gets stored up. A height difference of 50cm isn't very large, even with such a large reservoir size.