But again, other civilized nations have shorter sentences, nicer prisons, and less crime. So it doesn't seem to follow much at all. Now maybe they have less crime because they have just a different society somehow. But Canada is an awfully lot like the USA and they have less crime, shorter sentences and nicer prisons. (They have racial diversity, they have guns, they watch our TV, play our video games, it's like an alternate reality version of the USA)

I will admit that I don't understand the standards behind the cell phone industry, but why are cell phones so strongly coupled to the service providers and, well, not open?

If I want a landline, I can go buy any old phone I want, and as long as it speaks the right protocols (which are pretty simple for analog landlines) I can plug it into my wall, and it works.

If I want internet service, I can go buy Ye Olde Acme Cable Modem, plug it into my wall, call up my local ISP, and poof! I have internet.

If I'm out of disk space, I can go get a hard drive from Seagate and stick it into any machine I want to.

In so many other engineering situations, interoperability between one component and another is restricted only as far as it is required to be based on the manufacturer's engineering decisions. (I can't mount a Nikon lens on a Canon camera because they have two different ways of doing autofocus, for instance.)

Why the hell can't cell phones be this way, instead of the current quagmire where they're hopelessly entangled with what the carrier wants? I want a cellular carrier that charges a fair price for service (per byte and per minute, or whatever), and then lets me use whatever device I want to use that service. If I can stick a radio into a TI-89 and make it speak CDMA, let me make phone calls with it.

Whether or not the user-created content is high quality has little to do with whether there's infringement going on. It really looks to me like Vimeo has stepped over the line in terms of the safe harbor provisions -- they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. With the DMCA in its present form, that just isn't going to fly.

Of course you can mix it with...

This is how far I came in my quick rebuttal of your statement, before actually investigating the matter. After spending two hours doing that, I have come to the conclusion that you are absolutely correct, sir! Turns out, there is no formal definition of the MediaWiki syntax - it's just a number of regular expressions, and the implementation is the de facto standard.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor#State_of_WYSIWYG_and_MediaWiki_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki#Limitations

That's too bad, but they seem to be doing work to standardize that, and then it's just a matter of time before in-page editing. Of course, full browser support for MathML and SVG would also be great.

Pigeonhold the players into one of the 3 style is easy.

Letting the players to pick and choose from an array of strength / agility / defense for their own character would be a nighmare for those who program the game.

I always hated the leveling dynamic in rpg's and the idea that you had to be locked into one class. I'm not likely to have the time to play the game again and it would be fun to play different classes.

While you can't switch 'on the fly', UO has allowed you to choose your own array of skills, abilities, and attributes for something like a decade now. (And prior to AoS, you could swap out armor and accessories to swap between being fast and light, or a slow brick.)
 
While, again, you can't swap 'on the fly' (there are limits to how often you can swap between them), CoX allows you two builds within the same powerset.

I'm waiting^Wworking for the day when my wii in the wii fit doesn't change shape dramatically when matching mine...

Not all channels do this, and the issue hasn't existed for 60 years.

I agree. If enough people were that concerned about the volume of commercials, they wouldn't watch the shows and the problem would fix itself. No need to legislate something that can be dealt with by the nature of the market.

Although the article was very thin on details, I thought that it was worthwhile. It put a new spin on things because the list dealt with who was currently influential, rather than trotting out the old names that we've seen on lists like this for the last fifteen years. I realized after reading the article that I just don't care that much, though. Good thing they chose corporate types to put together this list, since they'll get a charge out of reading it.

Come on. With that many mentions of ODB in the summary, I'm surprised it's not ALL references to Big Baby Jesus.

I agree. If I could get TiVo to control my satellite receiver, I'd be back using it again. Dish Network's DVR is crap compared to TiVo.

But you would prefer watching a character dance onscreen than actually interacting with your girlfriend's physical body?

You haven't seen his girlfriend.

Yahoo worked fine for me before Google. I think you give it more credit than it deserves. The downside of Yahoo was its advertising and clutter. The searching part worked fine.

I felt like NBA Ballers (at least the first one) had a lot of the same spirit of NBA Jam. It had a lot of fast play and tons of jams. Check it out, if you haven't done so yet.

I was thinking the same thing! Proofreading is a lost art these days.