nuke it from orbit, its the only way to be sure

indeed videogames tend to do quite well in recessions, games are generally considered good value for money in terms of entertainment

hard money is contributions that are open, legal and easy to trace

soft money is given to politicians or organisations in a clandestine, untraceable way, it may or may not be illegal depending on the situation

OPEC won't gain wealth unless they actually sell some oil, they do have an incentive to restrict supplies but if they do so too much then alternative energy supplies become more economically viable.

I disagree, Britney isn't successful because some secret cabal made it so, people actually bought her records.

I suspect when the dust settles over the piracy you will still have artists like her, they fill a desire in the market.

Not sure if I buy it, yeah this generation may last longer than the standard five years, it basically already has for Microsoft.

It says more about the power of the consoles and the way games use them than it does about anything else. I have kind of noticed the same thing with PC gaming. My 8800GT still lets me play the latest games reasonably well. But how long will this last ?, I give it a couple of years max before either Sony or Microsoft start gearing up to release the first next gen console.

The difference is consequence.

Even in a lightly policed real world, the consequences of illegal actions would have a much greater effect.

whats activation like on win7 ?, do they still do that thing where if you change too many hardware components it forces you to re-activate.

I am running the RC1 here, really like it, don't think I will move to the official release until it runs out next summer.

I am surprised no one mentioned the ATAT's, sure they may have a purpose but sending them down to a snow planet when you could quite easily use something with tracks ?

Physical media is a red herring, games will be bought exclusively online within 10 years.

I think they are betting that the distribution model will completely change over the next 5 years or so. Your old psp and the umd's don't automatically stop working just because they released a new piece of hardware. I am assuming that you will be able to download new games on the older psp's as well.

In the long term they want to compete with the iPhone, high end mp3 players and pda's. I think its a smart move, it seems to signal an impending switch to download only game sales, they might be able to come up with a way of using the model to prevent piracy which would make the platform more attractive to developers. Not removing the umd would make the product less competitive in the market in the long run.

As a psp lite owner I think it needs a keyboard and/or touch screen to make it really useful and a threat to the likes of Apple.

Does your library have unreleased advance copies of coldplay albums ?

virtualiztion on ubuntu is not as simple as it is in Win7, you need to install either xen,kvm,quemu,etc. Its given me problems in the past.