Thanks for the link to that death threat thing and all, but can you please mark links that will plaster my screen with anime porn as "Not Safe For Work" in the future?

On that same note, we also just banned red light cameras in Bozeman. The city fought to keep them (a few months prior to them being activated), but the state stepped in and told the city that they would under no circumstances be allowed.

I'd actually submitted this article and I absolutely love Bozeman. It's a beautiful place to live. I think our city is a bit out of touch with what the citizens want and we sometimes need the state to intervene. With all of the coverage/press this issue is now getting, I'm sure the same thing will happen with this.

Everything you say is spot on, in my opinion, and I think most professors would agree.

Most of my math/physics profs in college would ONLY assign the even numbers because the answer was in the book. They weren't lazy, and actually checked whether you were arriving at the answer in the correct fashion. We'd get dinged if we omitted steps which weren't obvious, but likewise, we'd get partial credit if parts of our work was correct. This also gave the profs some gauge on which parts of the processes needed to be elaborated on in class, and if not frequently messed up enough, at least mentioned on the assignment so the student could get some insight as to where they went wrong.

The actual answer was usually worth very little compared to the process. If it were the opposite, I barely would have learned anything in those classes.

This idea already did the rounds in the form of an Internet rumor a couple of years back: http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/pinalert.asp

The Snopes page mentions why something like this hasn't been implemented:

Not entirely. I own a Popcorn Hour A110, and while I do love its ability to play basically any codec I toss at it, the UI leaves a LOT to be desired, which is what the parent mentioned about missing metadata from MKV. Any of the jukebox softwares for it need a ridiculously tedious weeding through of all media stored for them to appear well, and even then, the UI is slow and feels unresponsive. The built-in UI doesn't even have a "sort by date" functionality. This is all due to a very weak auxiliary processor for UI/background tasks.

The end all and be all solution is a video container with metadata information of its contents on a set top box that has a quick, responsive, and intuitive UI. Popcorn is definitely headed in the right direction, but I don't think they're there yet.

Small difference, relatively, but GTA III is actually almost 8 years old and not 6 (it was released October 2001).

Vintage is an ambiguous term, so he gets to play loosely with it. Regardless of whether you thought the game was fun or not, it WAS the first notably high selling game that did an open world sandbox well. There are countless games today that mimic the design (the new Red Faction game released yesterday, for one example).

Like it or not, GTA III was very influential for its design and the controversy that the game itself generated for its content.

Normally, I'd agree that this makes perfect sense... but video games are certainly a luxury sale that's very similar to music, and sales actually went UP a reported 18% as of last October (reference: http://venturebeat.com/2008/11/13/in-the-middle-of-economic-storm-us-video-game-sales-grew-18-percent-in-october/).

You'd think video game sales would suffer even more than music sales with the economic woes, since they cost $50 - $60 a purchase compared to an album's $12 - $20 sticker price.

Since this study points to last year, it's in the same time frame as the video game analysis.

My interest in the new Firefox betas is its official support of cross-site HTTP requests (documented at https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTTP_access_control). It's following the new W3C spec (http://dev.w3.org/2006/waf/access-control/) for allowing the XmlHttpRequest to communicate with an external domain without the use of the filthy "script get" hacks. I've just spent some time implementing a proof-of-concept for this stuff, and am impressed with how well it works. It even allows POST requests so you're not limited by the usual GET length limits.

It does require server-side modifications, but they're mostly simple.

I see this as the best new feature of Firefox and plan on adding support for this method of XHR into my applications, with failover to the old "script get" stuff. I only hope that other browsers also embrace this new functionality in the near future.