One of the most touching things I ever had on Xbox Live was when I received a message I from a friend who always seemed to be on, but not in the previous 2 weeks. The message was from his mother thanking me, and everyone on his friends list for being his friend and telling us he had passed away. She continued to tell us he had Downs Syndrome, and at 21 years of age had passed away from complications of it. She told us that we, his virtual friends were the only friends he really seemed to have, because we didn't know about, or judge him because of his condition.

Would this system have deprived him of the one joy he had in his life because he couldn't run the hundred meter dash, or didn't match up with some other physical standard?

Last time I toured the Cod they said it was the only sub that was a museum that had been unaltered for tourists. It's not handicapped accessible, tight areas around the ladders, you trip over the bulkheads etc. Get a good feeling for what it was like for the sailors.

A few years ago I was working in television as a video editor. I bought Final Cut to do some side projects on, to make my demo DVD as professional as possible while looking for another job, and because I was used to working with pro tools.

Now I'm a software developer, I make maybe 2 or 3 fun videos a year, friends weddings, highlights of hockey, and it isn't worth it to upgrade the software. There still is that pull of "I spent over $1k on that software I should make sure I can still use it, but at the same time when I look at how much more I'll need to spend on a hardware in order to still run it, I need to figure out where to cut the losses.

I thought I had justified it if I could make the entire house Mac centric, but to upgrade the netbook to the cheapest MacBook, and to buy a Mac Pro vs build a home system just doesn't justify it.

Yeah my main desktop at work is an Ubuntu machine, which runs VirtualBox whenever I need to do something which requires windows (not often). I also have an old iMac at work, but it doesn't do much but serve as an iTunes player, and doing the occasional SVN merge. I've always appreciated the OSX ui, and a few years ago bought Final Cut Pro to do some video editing as a hobby. I'd like to keep using it, but I'm caught in the Mac Hole. iMac isn't the ideal platform for it. Mac Pro is to expensive for something I'll be doing as a "hobby" I want to get my wife off of Windows, and the transition from Windows -> OSX would be just as easy/hard as the transition from Windows -> Ubuntu. Yes they aren't equal yet, but for what she'll use it for there will be close enough.

should have said "caused Apple to lose a hardware sale" That'll teach me not to hit preview.

It's funny as someone with an aging MacBook Pro, I was contemplating passing it down to my wife, claiming her netbook, installing osx86 on it, and then picking up a new Mac desktop, either an iMac or a Mac Pro, and just standardizing on OSX throughout the house.

Now I wonder if I'm better off just installing Ubuntu on the MBP and the Netbook and spend a lot less money on the desktop and build myself one with Ubuntu as well.

I'm not totally stating that this has caused Apple a hardware sale, (at least not yet) but it has made me re-think my strategy.

Right, like Apple needs a financial incentive to reject applications...

As a big hockey fan I picked up NHL 10, to play with friends on their online league, the EASHL. In past years the game just featured "real" equipment that the players in the league wore, and you could chose any of that for your character.

This year they featured customized "cool" equipment with boost slots. So a piece of equipment could be unlocked with 3 boost slots, and then up to 3 boosts could also be unlocked and added to it. So suddenly if you decided you wanted your character to look like he rides the short bus, you could actually increase your character up to 60 points, which is a major increase, considering leveling up your character fully only gets you about a 75 point increase.

EA set most of these "unlockables" to some really impossible tasks. Play 4 seasons, manually playing at least 40 games each season and score X number of goals each season. If somebody has a month, they could probably achieve this, but because these would be used in a competitive league, people wanted them now and EA allowed people to purchase them. $3 per equipment, $2 per boost. Maxing out the boost equipment on your guy comes to roughly $40, yet if you don't you're at a disadvantage from those who either have too much time and can unlock, or too much money and can just buy it all.

I bought one or two pieces to try and keep up, and would probably have bought more but my 360 RROD'd and its given me time to think. I doubt I'll buy a $60 game in the future where the part of the game I'm most likely to play will cost me a full $100, then I'll be fully expected to do it again next year.

Surely the school didn't purchase a bunch of new heart monitors because it might improve the calorie-burning of their students.

If you haven't been paying attention this summer -- fat people are the new terrorists. It seems a lot more plausible to me that a school is implementing a weight control plan than that they're expecting a gym teacher to diagnose cardiac abnormalities with a heart rate monitor, something a cardiologist couldn't do usefully.

Thinking this over some more, though, I'm more sympathetic to the asker's paranoia than I was at first. If school's can embrace policies of publicly weighing and humiliating children, they might well decide that the heart data might be shared in some inappropriate way, although the insurance thing seems unlikely.

Back in the olden days, we used to monitor our pulses in gym class using a finger and a clock. No, there's nothing suspicious about this, and anyone who used common equipment in gym should understand the benefit of buying your own strap instead of digging through a box to find the least sweaty one from the period before.

This is good advice, and gives me an opportunity to speak to the community at large: some of us who go to cons and are in a position to shake tons of hands politely decline. It's not because we're being dicks, it's because we know it's a good way to substantially decrease our chances of catching and spreading any germs.

I played the PAX Pandemic game, where the Enforcers handed out stickers to attendees that read [Carrier] [Infected] or [Immune] (There was also a [Patient Zero].

I got the [Immune] sticker, and by the time I got home on Monday, it was clear that I had the flu. I've had a fever between 100 and 104 all week that finally broke last night, but I'm going to the doctor today because I think whatever I had settled into my lungs. I'll tell him about the H1N1 outbreak and get tested if he wants to run the test, but at this point I think it's safe to assume that I was [Immune] to the Pig Plague, but definitely [Infected] with the damn PAX pox.

Even though it's been a week of misery, it was entirely worth it, and I don't regret going to PAX for a single second.

Last night, Evan unprotected his twitter account and Reifman began to follow him, under the disguise of a fembot.

Twitter seems as appealing to me as gluten-free pizza, so presumably a "fembot" is some Twitterism with which I'm unfamiliar, and not an actual fembot?

Don't talk to the police, or the FBI, or any authority without your lawyer.

Everyone knows that, but how many people have the number of a criminal defense attorney when they've never needed one before? Talking to the police (especially if you think your innocence is obvious) is an attractive option compared to sitting in a police station while you research lawyers or wait for Legal Aid to show up.

Of course, if I'd accidentally walked out with ultra-secret Goldman Sachs code while trying to download vi from an internal server, I'd be one of those people!