Unlocked means that the phone has been registered to a developer account at the marketplace (and can run unsigned applications).
So you either have a dev account (tied directly to your name/credit card), or you have jailbroken the phone with chevron WP7 (which requires a cert from their site which has been removed at the request of Microsoft).

Wake me up when they make something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ahoqR6OGdM&t=134s

And radeon 9800 LE (4 pixel pipelines) to the radeon 9800 pro (8 pixel pipelines).
I softmodded it with no problems, got quite the performance gain. A friend with an identical card (same brand/same chipset and bought within a month of eachother) got artifacts from about half his pixels being garbage.

That same softmodded card still works today (I gave it to another friend so that he could play BF2), while the crippled card of my friend is long dead.

Sure you can 'upgrade' it that way, but unless you stress test it first and make sure it works properly, will seriously shorten it's life by putting a heavy load on components that were already declared dead.

You get a lot of stuff free if you have a valid windows license though.

Outlook Express, the free thing that shipped with Windows XP is revamped to Windows Live Mail. I've used it for a while, got office 2007 (for free through some random student program) and switched to outlook for things where there is no web interface (Exchange webmail is horrible (and broken in some places) in anything but IE, and I don't have the time to install web access to the mail address of my webdomain).

You can always get Thunderbird if you like something free, and for people buying outlook: usually it's in some office package from work, or they know how to use it from work and like to do that at home. Not really smart, but a problem?

You stuff the netbook in your backpack, and then connect a random bluetooth telephone.
You could either have one of those stupid in-ear things, or something like this (http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/8928/).

Server farm services farm servers.

I'm pretty sure there is a barn somewhere with a bar, using something provided by the USDA.

I think something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvLCnKqYWzA&t=2m5s (4 screens with each different difficulty level, you obviously only play on 1 screen.)

Also, protections that cripple a game aren't that new, I've had DOS games totally glitch out (intentionally) because it was cracked.
Of course those protections were broken the minute it was known, and it bothered nobody, and with everything so easy piratable on the DS I guess the developers had to do something.

This would be newsworthy if it gave vuvuzela's in legit copies, but this is just a non-story.

MSE is the only anti-virus ever installed on this windows install.

I wipe most of my XP boxes every 6-8 months (and install from an nlited clean XP SP3 disk), due to clutter from certain programs, and I really make sure to never have installed two different anti-virus packages on the same install of windows.

Still thanks for the tip though.

The worldwide number of FB users is equal to the number of US citizens.

So there is plenty of Americans who don't have a facebook account :).

Microsoft Security Essentials regularly freaks out on my x32 XP box. It just crashes, causing 25% CPU usage (which is one hardware thread on an Atom 330).
The mouse still responds, some programs respond but explorer usually locks up, along with everything becoming horribly slow.
Killing the process fixes it, and MSE pops back in a couple of minutes, and then works normally for the rest of day.

Without that flaw, you could say it's just perfect. Doesn't take a lot of resources (even on an atom), is free with a valid Windows license, and keeps your system pretty much clean.

Tell your friends :)

No copyright = no GPL.

Proprietary software will still exist, and can steal all they want from the opensource community because there is nothing protecting the code.
The GPL uses copyright to enforce free sharing from third parties. Without copyright; it's either all locked up, or you place it in the public domain, so that everyone can do with it as they wish. And as a commercial product, somebody stealing your code would be legal. So you wouldn't want that either, since a computer would probably be just some toy without them.

A better alternative would be to only address commercial copyright infringement (think of large scale counterfeiters, selling pirated MP3's, commercial bootlegs of performances, not granny who had her grandson come over, or some useless anime AMV, sueing them until the point of financial suicide), but you won't see that any time soon, with everybody being greedy bastards.

The wiimote uses both a accelerometer as well as a vision based setup

You stack this "sensor bar" on top of your TV, which contains two IR LED's (replacing the white circle flicker thing that was used with lightguns)
The front of the wiimote contains an IR camera, and the wiimote itself processes the image into two lightblobs, which get transmitted to the Wii. It then tracks those blobs to get a reference on the rotation on the TV-facing axis of the wiimote, the distance between the blobs for the distance between the mote and the TV, the position of the blobs for the part of the screen the wiimote is pointing at, and it uses the accelerometers to try to guess things when it has no direct line-of-sight with the sensor bar. An accelerometer alone would never give enough accuracy to pinpoint the location a wiimote is pointing at, only a general idea on how the thing is rotated compared to the earth g-vector.

In terms of hardware, the Playstation Move comes closest to the wii, but instead of having two light points on your TV, the sensor is next to the TV with the players waving light points around. Kinect uses a whole different setup, projecting a IR grid on the room, and then using IR sensors to pickup the distance between a gridpoint in 2D and 3D projected space.

What is not standard about the USB ports on the Xbox? You can even hook up a regular old USB keyboard to it (makes debugging so much easier, by just adding some keyboard listeners to your code and let them fire debug stuff), it's the only device except for my PC that will charge my MP3 player (USB power handshake thing) , and inside the plastic shell lies a regular laptop SATA drive, with a funky connector to connect it to the Xbox (I've broken the thing open because my drive likes to spin down after initial boot, giving me a E68, but a quick disconnect-connect fixes that). That the drive is signed by microsoft with a file on the first couple of sectors is just DRM/anti-piracy/money grabbing, but you can rip it out, format it and use it as a normal drive, nothing abnormal about it.

If you're really so gung-ho for open, I don't see why you would be interested in a PS3, with all the rampant "shove it up your ass" anti-modding updates sony has been going on for the last year or so, or the fact that you'd have to re-encode your MKV's to watch on the damn thing.

The perfect open system is a Windows PC (Linux gaming is still a sad affair, even with Wine) with a beefy videocard, a x360 controller, all hooked up to a nice TV. The Games For Windows thing makes it almost into an Xbox (can't tell the difference between Just Cause 2 PC or Xbox, even the tooltips give you the correct icons0, you get better graphics and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. A cheap dualcore system with a 5770 goes for not that much money these days, and can keep up at full HD resolutions with ease. Also gives you access to every codec you will ever need, as well as multitasking, free multiplayer gaming, home entertainment system and whatever you cook up yourself in whatever programming language that you prefer.

PS: Slight hate on the PS3 for all the "fsck linux" attitude, but not intentional as a flame post

On-Topic: I hope they release some sort of (un)official extension for XNA with kinect integration soon, do that and I will buy the thing in a trifle, just to do some hacking with it. I'd guess the thing could also be used at parties: no flying wii-motes to hit expensive TV's :D.

What you describe is pretty much what XNA is all about.

100$/year access to run code on the machine (with full access to 5 of the 6 cores, and full access to the graphics card), you can privatly publish to your own xbox to test stuff, and it's community approved for placement in the Indie Marketplace where you can sell your stuff, which will only be denied if you either have serious bugs (bug handling is okay, as long as the machine doesnt crash or display some random error message), and you can't do certain things like have a game where avatars have sex or something of that nature.

Only downside is that you can't set the price for your stuff to 0, it has to be a minimum of either 60 or 80 MS Points (can't remember exactly).

I doubt as sponsors, more as participants.