They have been pretty open about latency issues. The server needs to be reasonably close (max 1000 miles) to keep round trip time below 80ms.

I am currently still a believer in this service. OnLive is not for the tiny hardcore gamers market who already have the best (expensive) equipment. I believe that OnLive might be able to get the casual gaming crowd introduced to high end gaming. Think Nintendo Wii target market, with PS3/XBOX360/High-end-PC gaming graphics. This market, not sensitive to the differences between OnLive and running the games native on your $5K gaming rig, could change the adoption rate of next gen games.

I sure hope it all works out.

"There was no year 0" should be placed in the context of the original folks who came up with the calendar and had it wrong. There have been various corrections to the calendar since, and calling the years xxx0 through xxx9 a decade is one of them.

In the story the (good) scientists lose against the (bad) profit-over-anything-corporate backed "private" military. The indigenous where caught in the middle without a say. That message was so obvious it wasn't much of a political statement as it was an easy good guys vs bad guys setup.

But that is not why I enjoyed this must see movie.

There is actually a parallel between why the media jumped on Tiger and the science flub so badly. In both cases the media attention is strengthened by the idea of breaking an otherwise stable 'uninteresting' topic.

Tiger is important in the world (of entertainment). He is an awesome sportsman, successful, rich, married nice girl, blah, blah, whatever. Problem for the media has been that we already know all of this by now. There is rarely ever anything new, or better (media point of view) bad to report. Well...the car crash ignited this massive media blitz against him for the sake of _trying_ to bring the guy down to 'the rest of us'.

Science is also seen as uninteresting. It's all logical stuff done by smart folks that know what they are doing. Nothing to report on. Problem is that those boring and smug scientists are behind all this science that is telling us to change our lives, and we can't come up with any reasons to tell them to buzz off, because well...those reasons typically have to be scientific, and we can't beat them at their own game.
And up comes a reason we can slap them over the head with...they cheated, and we know all about that. You know what says the media to fuel a story they have been itching to get away with, they probably all cheat!

Do not underestimate the interest in computer stuff of young kids. They recognize modern electronic toys (computers, phones, handheld gaming devices) from the other toys. My 4 year old is very good at playing his Nintendo DS (Kirby or anything Mario) and our Nintendo Wii (Zelda, Mario). He correctly uses a computer. Turns it ON, logs in to his account, launches Firefox (knows not to launch Explorer ;-) and watches Thomas the Train movies on Youtube.

My 1 year old knows how to operate a computer mouse. Moving it, clicking the buttons while looking at the screen for results (mixed ;-)

Both have little kids computers that teach them letters, numbers and soon easy words and arithmetic.

The biggest thing for them different from my generation is that computers aren't special.

C:\> echo You silly kids and your modern toys!

"locks third-party developers into a crippled Java sandbox"

Hmm, no it doesn't. Android offers an NDK for native application development. Yes your application entry point is still Java, but using Java's Native Interface (JNI) the main part of the app can be native (C/C++) just fine. It already supports native OpenGL ES 1.1 which is great for 3D games development on G1 or Droid phones which have great 3D graphics hardware.

note: I develop native apps for Android for a living.

Wasn't me, but could have been. I wouldn't be astroturfing, I'd be one of the many many engineers actually working on ARM processors. Are we not welcome here?

You can do whatever you want with software you legally own.

Problem is, there isn't much (or any?) software you legally own. You don't own the Windows install on your comp, or the OS X or even Linux versions. You have "licenses" to use those (even Linux) for particular means. And those licenses refer to legislation and other stuff (DMCA, patents, copyright law, ...) restricting your use even further.

Of course it didn't start or stop with SW. Big chunks of the music and movie industry have fought for years to prevent the "free" use of material through *cough* creative licenses.

Like a music class, why not approach this from a (sub-)genre point of view. Claiming to cover the genre's fantasy and science-fiction, is like saying we teach music of all kinds. Classical AND modern music. How about you break it up into (and I'm no expert):
- Classical sci-fi (Jules Verne, ...)
- pre-hard sci-fi. (Isaac Asimov, ...), No idea what this sub-genre's name would be
- Science-Fantasy (Douglas Adams, ...), making this up as I go
- Cyber-punk (William Gibson, ...)
- Space Opera (Vernor Vinge, ...)
- Hard sci-fi (Kim Stanley Robbinson, ..)
- Singularity visions (Corey Doctorow, ...)
- etc.

Of course several writers crossed borders, but that is a good topic for discussion.

Knowing the above does a lot more good then discussion any particular "oh, oh...this book was so great" title that has been mentioned in this thread.

I'm with parent on this. I'm a developer at a big company. Have 3 machines in front of me[*]. Don't have access to firewall logs, assuming IT is doing a decent job because none of my machines have ever gone down in last 3 years. Still, modern malware wouldn't take my machine down so I could very well be infected. How do I know? What do I scan?

[*] Linux on one, WinXP on the others because that is what the job demands (don't argue).

Do you ever use Google maps?

So there!

I'm no GPL expert, but could you download the $2.99 game and re-upload it offering it for free?

Reference or it didn't hap...ehh, I actually totally believe you already. Still, a reference would be great so we can spread the word that we are on to you crazy people. Yeah, you know who I am talking about! :-)

angstscreeuw = fear scream (one word in Dutch) = 8 consonants in a row
slechtstscrijvend = worst written (one word in Dutch) = 9 consonants in a row

some more fun examples from the Dutch language:
koeieuier = Cow's udder = 7 vowels in a row
Jazzzinger = Jazz Singer = 3 z's in a row