They didn't hang onto the old code. Novell only owned WordPerfect between buying it in June 1994 and selling it to Corel in January 1996. (Technically, they did hold onto some of the WordPerfect libraries, which they integrated into GroupWoes.)

Personally, I find MathWorld pretty good for that purpose. Most articles are pretty encyclopedic in nature -- providing first a simple, general explanation, then diving deeper into the more complicated stuff (where the math gets more advanced by necessity).

Unfortunately, the article on floating-point arithmetic is just a one-liner (likely because it's more computer science than math).

There's a few main issues.

1) Angle.
2) Delay.
3) Controller.

The camera needs to be higher to give a better vantage point.

The camera has to be able to do real-time video. 30ms delay is good. 60ms is okay, 200ms is unacceptable. If you have a GeForce card, use nHancer to raise or lower the Prerender Limit. That's the number of frames that can or do get rendered/stored, to maintain a smooth framerate. Bigger number usually increases delay, making it difficult to play.

The wheel is another area where there's input delay. It takes time to spin it rather than just pressing a button.

It's possible that these people were playing with ~500ms delay. That's quite nasty. It'd take a few hours of playing to get used to it, but it'd still be a big problem compared to no delay.

I'm sure that if you saw someone that you could clearly recognize as a civilian just a short drive away, and you saw the "good guys" hovering above, you would think you could drive up and get them to a hospital.

But maybe that's just me. Maybe you'd stay out of harm's way and watch the poor guy bleed to death because you're suspicious of the Americans. Hell, this'll probably be used by terrorist recruiters. "Oh, you think the Americans are here to save you? Look at this! A family tried to save a wounded man, and they shot down the entire family and the wounded man! They justified it by calling it a battle zone!"

There is zero justification for being pumped full of adrenaline and begging to shoot at a vehicle that picked up a wounded man. They seriously couldn't wait half a second to see if the vehicle actually picked up any bodies or weapons?

Copyright that last forever is the problem here.

Current U.S. copyright for an individual is life plus 70 years and for a corporation 95 years. Since both of those are longer then the U.S. life expectancy, copyright is now infinite. I guess Jack Valenti got his wish.

I am willing to bet your internet connection is faster/more stable than his. I would also be that you are both using a different version of the 360. (There are how many different motherboards now?)

I have had "two" 360's. A launch and one built in the last year. The launch "one" (it was replaced several times do to RRoD) was significantly slower when installing updates or pretty much anything. I even measured the delay between action sent to the console (like hitting a button) and display on an output device (TV, computer, timing device). The old system had a consistent 40% larger delay on average.

I like to commute to work in (what is to me) a self-driving vehicle. I play on my DS while doing it.

I call it a subway. (Though buses and trains also work.)

I was setting up security questions with ING Direct a few months ago. (They ask a question that I need to answer before they show me a page with my secret image/phrase and a prompt for my PIN. The secret image/phrase combo lets me know that it's not a phishing site.)

Anyway, one of the possible questions was "What was your favourite childhood toy?". In my case, it was a beaver hand puppet I've had since before the age of two. Lacking imagination at that age, I simply named it "Beaver".

ING's response was something to the effect of "We're sorry. The answer you have provided contains restricted words."

Seriously, WTF?

Unfortunately Goggles didn't pass muster with a recent focus group, so it could be a while before Google decides this is ready to hit the streets.

So, the Goggles... they do nothing?

If they do offer this service, I see potential for a much-improved version of my great experience with cheap mobile internet access seven years ago.

Back then, a lot of mobile phones didn't offer graphical web-browsing. My phone at the time (some Samsung of some form) was purely text-based, but Telus (in Canada) offered a $2/month unlimited email option.

So, I signed up, and after the novelty of being able to check my email anywhere wore off, I began itching for more information.

Since Telus would still charge me 50 cents for Canada411 lookups, the first thing I did was write an email gateway for canada411.com (which was probably still canada411.sympatico.ca at the time). I had email to my domain set up to go to my home computer, and directed all email to services@mydomain directed through qmail to go to a Perl script.

If the subject was "Canada411" (since Telus allowed me to store various preset subject lines), it would then parse the body as lookup parameters (Last name, First name, City, if I recall correctly). Then it would email me the results in plain text, after doing some web-scraping.

Later on, I added some more "services", like dictionary lookups, recipes, university course schedules, etc. I could even list the current Slashdot headlines if I wanted (in retrospect, since RSS was already around, a basic email-based RSS reader would probably have been more generally-applicable).

Nowadays, with HTML email being the norm for smartphones, you wouldn't even necessarily need to do the web-scraping (which is what ate up most of my development time).

With email-based web-browsing, you can get what you want, but it takes a certain amount of patience and ingenuity.