I think you misread slightly, they said it was like 'dry counties' not 'dry countries' - as in a county in a US state where alcohol is prohibited, and which will often border another county in the same state where alcohol is freely available.

Why does the answer have to be either 'taxi' or 'bus' when it's possible to combine the two and have a sensible multi-drop scheme? This would need a decent number of users (Higher than that needed to sustain a local bus company, I'd guess), but would manage to combine the two nicely, and with computerised routing of vehicles should be practical.

Like a taxi you book from where you are, and it'll come to collect you there and drop you off at your requested destination. Unlike a taxi though there could be others riding already, and the vehicle may divert to make pick ups/drop offs on the way within reason.

The result is something which is similar to a less direct taxi, but will be a a lot cheaper as it's multi-occupant and will have passengers almost continually, similar to a bus. It also means that there are less vehicles on the road as each one is carrying more people, and this reduction would actually improve as the service became more popular- it's easier to have efficient routes when there are more options available. Vehicles would likely range from large cars to small buses, things small enough to get through residential areas (I'm in the UK where getting something the size of a full bus down a side street would be impressive) but large enough to carry a few small groups of people.

If you want to keep the 'bus' mentality too then have scheduled pick-ups over the most-used routes, so 'There will be a vehicle arriving at Easterly School every ten minutes traveling to the city center, and arriving forty minutes later'. This may also do other pickups and drop-offs on the way but will arrive more or less when it says unless there are problems.

Some are a pain, most aren't.

A lot of titles have nice (often 3rd party) mod managers now which'll download mods, keep them updated, and allow you to selectively disable them- all from a simple GUI. When I recently replayed Skyrim I spent about an hour or so browsing through all of the mods on Nexus, and installing those that look interesting, and in my mind it made the game a lot more fun.

I admit there were a couple that were slightly broken in odds ways, such as a custom weapon which was heavily overpowered, but it didn't take much effort to just turn them off again.

Hmm.. Minesweeper meets Minecraft. It suddenly all makes sense.

"These are not the drones you are looking for.."

That game wasn't part of the same series, as made clear at the start of the Football Manager writeup. The CM/FM series only had text descriptions of matches to start with and there were a lot of traditionalists who complained when they announced there were to be graphics added.

If they're taking money for it and selling it openly to the public then it's been released, it doesn't matter that the technology is labelled as being 'for development'. Were they to restricting sale to people who qualified as a developer in some way then maybe, but as it is most of these are finding their way into the hands of people who use them to play HL2, another couple of games, and then take up some space in the wardrobe.

Dev companies won't care too much, they'll take the $120 hit on a device if it's something they're going to make a lot more from. Getting the paperwork sorted to buy them may be more hassle, but most will do it.

Agreed. Writing a game is something that one enthusiastic developer can at least sensibly aspire to in their spare time, trying to build a game on top of a custom engine is something else entirely- the amount of rendering code, tools, integration, and other side tasks just pile up too quickly.

A lot of the mobile games are written using Unity which allows C# to be used on all platforms, from mobile, through PC, and even consoles if you have the dev license for them.

The only issue with Unity is if you need the Pro version be ready to pay some serious money, but for a lot of mobile games the Indie/Free version is fine.

Microsoft are no longer actively developing XNA, and haven't been for quite some time now. Better to go with something which is going to support the systems which will be available when your development's finished.

The use of the word drone to describe these is correct.

The Oxford English Dictionary includes the definition for a Drone as 'A pilotless aircraft or missile directed by remote control', a use that dates back at least to 1946 ("The Navy's drones will be..led—by radio control, of course—to a landing field at Roi."). There's no definition listed for a completely autonomous unit.

Been using Steam since shortly after HL2 was released, and the few minor problems I've had with it have been sorted out quickly. Sorry your friend's had problems but personally it's my preferred way to buy games now.

When a paper is published it should include the methodology used to gather the results, and if that includes a lot of untested and uncertified pieces of kit then it's going to cast serious doubts as to the validity of the findings. Have they actually found something of significance, or are they just prodding round some experimental error which wouldn't be there if they used tried and tested setups? It'll be fine for teaching, and that will help it to gain some credibility, but for a lot of research it's going to take a long time to gain acceptance without a large testing and certification budget behind it.

Some 360 degree cameras will be great for VR, but this one wouldn't. The vertical field of view isn't that great and it'd just appear as a loop round you rather than actually giving you the experience of being there.

Something like the Bubl camera would work a lot better, there you almost have a full spherical capture so the user can look up and down.

People still use C? Really?