I recently built a gaming rig at the same time as a buddy. Naturally we tried to out do each-other but ended up with similar boxes. Not to be out-done, I attached a rudder to my computer. It didn't do anything but always made me feel I had the superior box. Recently I installed a mini-fridge in my room, much to the chagrin of the surge protector. I had to replace the whole computer. Rudder is still good though.

The only problem that I see here is that my ex-girlfriend is going to be able to understand my drunken texts I send her now.

True, while Kinect will most likely not replace a physical controller any time soon for games which require high degrees of concentration, accuracy, and dexterity; I am mostly interested in the technology as a UI control replacement. The mouse, traditionally limited to a 2d plane, will be replaced by hand gestures that are recognised in 3 dimensions. This will not only make navigating systems more intuitive for the non-technical but will also allow development for 3d GUI environments. I have played with a "relatively" popular 3d desktop environment in the past and I feel the reason it never caught on was due to the limitations of user input.

NEXT STORY!!!

Three things I see happening now are 1) Displays getting bigger and bigger. 2) 3-D everywhere 3) Application integration with normal TV's. I think the next big thing in browsing will be developed for the TV user, like a widget for a web enabled Sony TV or something. I could see semething in the more distant future integrating the 3-d effect with touch/motion detection.

Water is now a finite resource! Hopefully they can make a virus that puts the water back together again... O.o

Barracuda networks offers a backup service that scales very well with large databases. They also use a deduplication technology that examines each file part by part. If two parts are the same then only one is kept and the other has a marker. In most cases the deduplication ratio is at least 5x (meaning 1tb turns into 200gb) and sometimes it can go as high as 50x deduplication (this is mostly the case with images). After dedup, the data is encrypted and compressed (compression far out weighs the encryption in terms of size) and THEN it's sent off to the cloud.