They have this compatibility pack which proclaims it gives the ability to open newer format files in older versions of office; not sure as to its success level: Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats.

They only have permission to search for certain specific categories of evidence, despite having the entire archive, so they wouldn't be able to find them guilty of some minor illegal activity unless it was part of the specific categories the judge authorised.

Have you ever tried to find something in your email account that you know is there but couldn't locate it using any search terms that came to mind, only to find it later along with something completely unrelated? How hard do you think it would be to describe to a Google employee the type of information you want them to search for in (likely) thousands of emails and get a perfect success rate (assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that that's the only satisfactory outcome)?

It seems to be the same thing, to me. So we have limitations to the type of evidence that may be acquired, and the ability to find that evidence using people with intimate knowledge of the case (as opposed to a corporation's employee).

I don't get the fuss, it's not like you have some right to hide suspected (they got a warrant) illegal activities just because they're recorded in an email archive stored somewhere other than your computer's hard drive. The only problem I have with it could be described as a slippery slope fallacy; that is, maybe the rules will become more relaxed over time as more judges build on this case. But that's somewhat pointless speculation at this point; this judge seems to be quite sane.

It's mostly the exclusive pre-order content, I assume, that causes them to want to pre-order a game they think they'll like so they don't miss out on whatever bonus it is. At least, that's probably the only reason I can think of for pre-ordering a console game.

The problem there, then, is that research papers which analyse a failure aren't accepted often enough, which probably leads to other people redundantly repeating the same fruitless efforts. Failures aren't as flashy, but they're surely still useful.

It might be fun for them to show off their ability at playing the game after the fact, but that doesn't change the reality of testing not living up to the dream job standard when you're actually doing the work part. It's not the worst job available, but it's not "dream job" material in the overwhelming majority of cases (though it might be a stepping stone to a dream job, sometimes).

Not every game needs to be super CPU-intensive though; Hearthstone is created in Unity3D, for example, and that works super well on everything but an iPad2. Skipping C++ initially and learning to create a game in Unity3D with C# is probably a wise choice for a bunch of people, at least for prototyping and for a wide variety of games that aren't CPU-limited.

Aren't most coffee machines in fast-food outlets fully automated these days? As in, select the type and it'll produce the coffee for you, at the correct temperature, without burning? You'd pretty much always get a consistent result given the same inputs. That wouldn't stop it from being consistently bad, though, if the beans weren't very good or the milk was skillfully burned.

The TEDxOU talk Debunking the Paleo Diet is pretty interesting from the standpoint of determining what our ancestors actually consumed, though it doesn't prove anything on whether the actual "Paleo Diet" rules are good or bad. It's given by an archaeological scientist who studies ancient health/diet. She points out a few examples of foods which didn't exist when our ancestors were around that are commonly included in the Paleo Diet, which is interesting.

As far as problem gambling goes...

The most common argument I read about this and related topics is "let them fail", which does appear to be a good idea on the surface – they'll learn a lesson and be able to move on. The problem is that, at least in this case, the result of allowing them to learn for themselves is financial ruin, and then you are obligated to help them recover through various government-funded programs (as allowing them to starve / etc. would be morally dubious to say the least).

In cases where the failure leads to a burden on other people you can fairly easily make the argument that something representing those people (i.e. the government) should intervene and prevent that burden from eventuating, where possible. In this case it involves erecting barriers to gambling that make it more difficult to lose excessive quantities of money; by applying limits to withdrawals from bank accounts within casino-type areas, requiring people to enter licensed areas to gamble, and through other measures, we can reduce the likelihood that someone will lose enough money that we have to solve their problem.

If you or I are going to end up paying for allowing someone else to make their own mistakes – mistakes which could be avoided with less of our money – then I'm all for using strategies to avoid it, with the appropriate cautions and caveats.

In the process eliminating most of the time they could be spending training or looking for work, thus causing them to remain on unemployment for a long time and not solving the problem at all. At least, that's the plan by the new conservative government; the previous government didn't require the 'voluntary' work which meant more time for job hunting and training. Sure, some people abuse it, but what else is new.

So it seems the Rift movies are in phase one still, where they experiment with replicating 2D movies in a 3D environment, and the result is about as boring as you'd expect. A bit like movie -> game (or vice-versa) conversions, you've really got to transform the work to fit the medium copying the scene verbatim with directionless self-insertion into the scene is pretty dull.

Based on my few minutes of thinking about it, I'm inclined to believe that the only way Rift "movies" will work is either as games or as replications of a play, where the user is stationary but can look around a scene in front of them from their vantage point. If you can't control at least part of the user's vision you're going to have a difficult time making a good movie – they could be looking in completely the wrong direction when something interesting happens, even with audio cues indicating where to look. A play allows the audience member to look around, but only in one major direction, which seems like it would fit the Rift pretty well. I guess this could include virtual concerts too; might even be able to do them in real-time with a good camera setup.

I've thought about this point a bit when others have mentioned it on slashdot – the idea that a government should hold nothing beyond easy public access unless it presents a true danger to the people, as defined by the people. It's a great ideal, but I don't think it'd survive the news media in any country; the 24/7 news vultures would shred any political who enacted such legislation to bits. No matter how well-intentioned your actions are, someone will spin it into doom to sell ads.

It's not entirely the media's fault – a lot of things that happen behind closed doors really shouldn't occur at all – but there's little point in denying that it'd be political suicide. If you've gone to the effort of getting elected, why would you want to nearly guarantee your opponents get the next election for free? First thing they'd do is reverse your openness policy, and we'd be back at square one. A good example of this happened in Australia recently; the prior political party openly reported on the attempts of refugees to enter the country without prior authorisation, and their opposition shredded them over some invented crisis. First thing they did when they got elected? Suppressed all information related to refugee entry attempts.

The ideal is a good one, but it requires mass education and critical thinking that currently doesn't exist in any country I've heard of.

Given the media exposure of Snowden it'd probably be very difficult to acquire an unbiased jury of his peers to judge him fairly, which is a bit of a flaw in the system. It can be very difficult to change a preconceived notion – even when you've been been presented evidence proving what's wrong and right the original notion can still influence your decisions.

I don't know about you, but I play a few games for the story – sometimes in spite of gameplay I don't enjoy. If I'm curious about the storyline in a game but not really interested in the gameplay, perhaps watching someone else play and skipping through the combat part I can see the story and skip paying for the game. I'm not saying their stories are particularly good, by the way, I'm just noting that if I'm somehow invested it can be more efficient to watch someone else play whilst doing something else during the sometimes pointless combat interludes than playing myself.

I don't get the full experience that way, there's nothing gained from exploring or having control, but I'm still consuming content created by a company in an abbreviated format. In that scenario, perhaps it's right that the company gets the majority or all of the money from advertising attached to those videos.

An example: I find Diablo 3 a little dull now, but the cinematic for the expansion had me curious about Malthael (their cinematic trailers are often enough to invoke curiosity – I play Starcraft only to see how that story plays out, regardless of what I think of the gameplay). Watch a few videos and curiosity sated, no game purchased. Blizzard should probably get the ad revenue for the videos, as they didn't really add anything different to what all players experience.

It does get a bit hairier when there's significant commentary, skill, or other creativity involved.

So some people used a system with no lowercase letters 30 years ago and that means they write in lowercase today. It's perhaps more likely that the startups don't capitalise because it reads as more informal, and the anonymous coward didn't use capitals because they couldn't be bothered (much like they couldn't be bothered to log in). It'd be pretty weird, but I guess not impossible, for someone to go 30 years communicating online with people that use capital letters and not attempt to retrain themselves to do so.

I mean, it's not like it doesn't have benefits; capital letters – where appropriate – can improve the readability of a paragraph quite significantly. A single-world name? Not so much.