No, you're right. In those cases, it probably really IS ball lightning. But some reported cases of ball lightning might actually be hallucinations, and not the real thing.

...this just delays it a bit.

But the Government has a clear mandate here, and now that SA has a new Attorney-General (one who is on record as being a proponent of harmonising game rating with film/tv/book ratings), I think this will actually happen. Might be another year or two (the legislative process is pretty slow) but it will happen.

The govt. does have a point though. If you have a consultation where one 'side' spams you up with 50,000 individual submissions, but the other 'side' consolidates their arguments into a few submissions, it is important not to let the former drown out the latter. It's not a vote - the Government will consider all the viewpoints and their own constitutional obligations re responsible government, and come to a reasoned conclusion. I'm still pretty confident that conclusion will be pro-R18+ rating for games though. It has pretty overwhelming support.

There's no question that the current setup, in which the European Patent Office only performs a unified examination of a patent application but doesn't really grant a single European patent, is suboptimal from the perspective of those taking out patents. It's also an inefficiency that patent litigation can currently only take place on a country-by-country basis (including invalidation, unless oppositions happens early enough so that the EPO itself could reject the patent application).

However, if an international construct such as the European patent system is made more efficient and powerful, then that increase in power and efficiency should be accompanied by an at least proportional increase in power of democratically elected lawmakers governing the same field of policy-making. That should be a governing principle regardless of whether hardware, software or other patents are at stake. The patent examiners' union raises that point and basically says that the exact opposite is happening from their point of view: more power and less control.

> Because of points 1 and 2, uncrackable DRM/Copy Protection would produce no significant increase in revenue -- certainly nowhere near the absurd number claimed by the BSA.

Now consider that they may actually realise this, and you have an explanation why DRM never turns out as good as it could be.

A year too late :(

Unfortunately the future of PC gaming through traditional (dedicated server) means is in jeopardy as far as mainstream titles are concerned.

PC games used to have an online edge because even if a game was created across many platforms the PC game would have Modding capabilities as well as dedicated servers. This edge would continue as games would become timeless and online play would only be limited by community support rather than some douche behind a desk crunching numbers.

Unfortunately this differentiation has been eroded by the idea that simplification sells.

SOURCE: http://modernwarfare2.infinityward.com/

His job is to vote yes or no. It's actually not a hard job. I'm not certain he needs to or should be paying attention to do his job well. The R behind his name implies he's going to vote against abortion. It's not his responsibility to listen to the other side of the aisle and all their arguments. His job is to vote the way he thinks the people who put him there want him to vote.

whether or not these guys should be paid so much to do such an easy job is up for argument.

if every idea was protected forever, that would eventually create a legal minefield for anyone trying to publish something new. they'd have to go through ages of creations to check if anything remotely resembled their own, and it'll only grow as more people find gaps. eventually, you'll need someone specialized in finding these gaps to assist you while you create. is that your dream world? it isn't mine.

the shitty bit about this is that i own a "3G" ipod touch 8gb, which is nothing more then a 2G ipod with an exterior update to look like the actual 3Gs

So apple sells this as a new ipod touch, but it wont run their newest software.. i wonder if OS 4.0 means the death of the 2.5G 8gb ipod.

I'll survive though, considering ive gotten along without multitasking so far. I would have really liked it, but eh.. if i really want it i'll just have to pony up the dough for a new iPad nano...

not using it as a phone is my guess

my GF had her 3GS on plane-mode while on vacation (because of the excessive data-roaming charges), and suddenly battery-life is almost a week.. it basically becomes and ipod touch with a larger battery, and it survives on zero power :P

Read my post again. I am not disputing that Dell has more variety; that is a clear no brainer.

My point is that even though Dell has more variety, doesn't mean that Apple doesn't have any. The two do not correlate. Your original assertion was that because Apple has no sub-$1k gaming laptop that they had no variety. Well, you actually said "little actual variety" (direct quote), despite having demonstrably different product lines that are physically different from one another in pretty marked ways - some are laptops, one is the size of a few CDS, one is designed to be expandable, the other has a screen built in but is a desktop. They also sell phones and music players.

The fundamental raw product lines are reasonably similar to Dell - Inspiron/Latitude in laptops for example, with a large array of configurations of those base products (far more than with the MacBook and MacBook Pro configs, but still based on a small subset of designs).

As to whether "gaylordest" is a word, however, is perhaps a discussion for another time. Maybe it's a word in high school.

Again, since your level of discourse appears to only go so high that "gaylordest" is actually a word in your vocabulary, I will repeat that I am not saying that Apple has more variety than Dell, nor did I ever state or imply that in earlier posts.

I won't speculate on this but, in spite of what the reply above seems to imply, I doubt it's out of concern for the users.

It might be doable but it would definitely count as the use of "intermediary translation ... tool" and so be clearly forbidden. Now in practice I don't think Apple is going to carefully examine all apps to check whether they do it and I'm not even certain that wxWidgets falls into this category anyhow. Unfortunately being uncertain that it does not is quite enough to dissuade anybody from even considering it. And this is even better than FUD because while there certainly is fear and uncertainty, there is no doubt whatsoever that Apple won't hesitate to prohibit any "portable cross-platform C++ frameworks" if it ever decides it would be beneficial to it.

You've got to admire Apple even if you find what they do as hateful as I do. They do know how to play the game and their progressive developer lock-in works better than anything Microsoft ever dreamt about (but now they will try to copy Apple, of course -- initially with lesser success but sooner or later they will get there too). And if all this evokes herds of lemmings to me this is surely just my own personal problem...

Interestingly enough nobody seems to have mentioned this gem yet. To summarize, Apple has decided to forbid

Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool

While this is clearly aimed squarely at Adobe and their Flash compiler I can't help wondering what does it mean even for C++ libraries such as Qt or wxWidgets (that I'm personally most interested in) as, with a bit of bad faith (that Apple doesn't seem to luck), they could be construed to be "intermediary compatibility layers" too. And this definitely seems to exclude using Perl, Python, Ruby or anything else.

If anybody had any doubts about Apple openness, this should hopefully be enough to dispel them (although whom am I kidding... there will surely be people able to justify this as well).

No, it hasn't. But this might be explained by the fact that Firefox doesn't
use GTK+.

And the rest of your comment is about as accurate...

Go ahead and try them. If convicted, pull their patents and let other companies provide the product.