"We acknowledge that our customers will move completely to e-books once they get used to the idea and find out they can save money."

"Notch," the developer behind the famous Minecraft game, also ostensibly proposed pulsars as navigation beacons for his now-defunct game "0x10c." He used (generated) data collection from a pulsar as part of a series of puzzles related to PR for the game.

I've thought about creating a social game that integrates real world data for creating instant communities, but every mapping solution I've looked at requires you to host hundreds of gigabytes of image data, or purchase views after X number of free queries per month. As an independent developer, neither of those is practical for me.

Is there a truly free-as-in-beer map database that actually looks good at, say, a 10-mile radius zoom level that doesn't consume hundreds of gigabytes?

I tried that when I purchased the ASUS P8P67 motherboard. It had *tons* of reviews, and was one of the top-rated LGA1155 boards with more than 100 reviews.

Just purchased an ASUS P8P67 motherboard for a brand new Core i7 2600k install; my first new PC in like 5 years. I chose the P8P67 because it had a good assortment of SATA 3 and USB 3 ports for expansion. I had a DVD burner and 3 SATA drives to put into it; I like lots of storage.

I hooked up the drives, putting my brand new WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA 3 hard drive in the first SATA 3 port, and started installing Windows 7. It seemed to take a long time. The installation finished and I started installing all the usual utilities, apps, and games that one has to install on a new PC. I noticed that my system kept pausing, however. I would try to install something, and I would get frequent hourglass pauses, and sometimes the system would seem to lock up for up to 20 seconds at a time.

Eventually, I looked into the system log and saw that there were a bunch of errors coming up every time this happened; disk unavailable, and a driver name. The driver was for the Marvell SATA controller.

I moved that drive to one of the Intel SATA 3 ports (the other drives were not on the Marvell ports) and I have had no problems of that nature in the three weeks since then.

So, basically two of my SATA 3 ports, one of the primary reasons I chose this motherboard, are of no use to me.

Oh, funny fact; my older system had an ASUS P5N SLI motherboard. Marvell SATA chipset. My and I had both problems with that controller too (identical systems.)

Instead of lowering the price to license, it would make much more sense to *increase* the license price for SOE because SWG was going nowhere. Why have a powerful property giving bad impressions and diluting the marketplace for the new game? Lucas is motivated to make his IP look good with a successful MMO, so he'd want to give it the best chance by killing off the crappy implementation: SWG. Fans go to ToR, SOE gets to shut down servers that are already on life support, and everyone's happy except the few people that actually liked SWG.

In EverQuest, an MMORPG that predates WoW, people have been using third-party software to automate many things for years, including selling items in the Bazaar (marketplace.)

Due to common errors in logic, it was fairly easy to spot, and somewhat easy to exploit, these scripts. The scripts would re-price their items based on other items for sale, either to lower the prices to just below the lowest price, or raise them when competing items were sold and theirs were the only items of that kind for sale.

I know this isn't real currency, but I think it's interesting to see the parallels.

I'd rather have a buggy Flash as an option than to have no choice at all.

It should get there eventually. Until then, use it when it works, disable it when it becomes a problem. Hardware inconsistency is one problem I'm sure, and it's really a shame that some vendors created slow, resource-starved Android phones.

The emulator also runs like a piece of frozen dogshit. Its speed is horrible, and should not be used as any indicator of performance.

Additionally, it cannot emulate (without a LOT of effort) any of the specialized sensors like accelerometer, multitouch, GPS, and so on.

Agreed! Considering I have a high definition 65" screen at home, free food and a pause button to use the bathroom means the theater loses almost every time (Avatar and Tron: Legacy in 3D being notable exceptions!). Even buying it at full Blu Ray price is a better deal than paying for tickets and concessions for me and my wife, but it's still beyond the "impulse buy" limit for something that loses almost all of its value after one screening.

Excellent comment. Friends who own ebook readers have said the exact same thing to me. This is not an uncommon phenomenon.

A few game companies are doing this sort of thing for old school games, like Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 anthologies. Other industries should catch on.

I agree, it's not overpriced right now as an early adoption technology. It's not like you can't read any books without it.

As time passes and Amazon makes back their investment, more competition gets into the market, and manufacturing processes drop even lower, I expect decent reader prices to drop near the $50 mark or lower. ...as long as booksellers stop this ridiculous overcharging on mainstream ebooks and drop them to a reasonable range. There have been a lot of great ideas killed by greedy people taxing it or overcharging it into oblivion. Or deliberately making something unprofitable for political or strategic reasons.

All books are free if you know where to look. If you end up liking the book, support the author by purchasing their books. If you don't like a book after the first couple chapters, just delete it.

That's a good idea, actually; give people the first few chapters of a book for free. If they like it, let them purchase the rest. Oh wait, then only quality would make money instead of overrated garbage; can't have that. At least with music, you usually get to hear the "best" track on the radio, and if you want you can just purchase that track (only an option relatively recently), or try to find the rest of the band's music online to see if you like it and want to buy the album.

I got a Kindle for Xmas. One of the best things ever. I've read over a dozen books since I got it, and at that pace I will have read 10x as many books as I read last year.