I thought you trusted that Nintendo didn't release hardware just for the sake of releasing hardware. The 3DS is a speed bump, but does add 3D, a gyro from the wiimote tech and a pedometer from the pokewalker. The play coins are a cool feature and improves upon the chances of finding someone to streetpass which is also a cool feature. No one knows the feature list of the next home console (being more important than the spec sheet) and so no one can really say. That said, it is disappointing to know that there are games that are still in development for Wii (like Dragon Quest X) and will look outdated after a new console comes out..

And I had a dream to build a mechanical setup to control a 360 controller to "TAS" Trials HD. That game begs to be demonstrated as a perfect play. But alas, I don't have any skills like that so the dream is dead.. I suppose it would be easier to try to take apart a controller, learn the signalling and basically have a minute long macro button. Any takers?

Obviously, one drawback is the cost, but another is that it only works on black vinyl. Between 1/4 and 1/3 of my collection is clear or coloured which adds to the list of problems.

"I saw a billboard for the lottery. It said, "Estimated lottery jackpot 55 million dollars." I did not know that was estimated. That would suck if you won and they said, "Oh, we were off by two zeroes. We estimate that you are angry!""

You're right about that part.. What I don't get is why enforce a curfew on a subset of youth? If you're going to try to straighten out youth, I would figure that you would want to target teens who would be more likely to commit crimes rather than a group that is less likely to do so.. To punish people for not committing a crime? Bad form imo..

I think you're thinking of Aqua not Cocoa.. Cocoa is Objective C programming for the game engine which is a different ball of wax than what it would be like to port to linux. The graphics libraries being OpenGL - yeah that will help a move to linux, but it's obviously not 100% to the point of running a mac binary on a linux box.

If emergency calls cannot go through under "100%" usage of the tower, something is seriously wrong. There needs to be bandwidth provisioned and reserved for emergency calls for every tower and trunk.

If this does affect emergency calls, AT&T really does need to get their shit together. I assume there are laws in place to enforce the transmission of emergency calls. Hell AT&T gets a free stress test of their network which is something they should be doing anyway. Real world data of extreme usage. Study, learn and yes: build a better network because of it.

The first .hack series had Japanese or English audio which was great. The fact that the game was spread over four games wasn't so good... But the tone and intonation was lost between the two and is a frequent thing. I'm enough of a japanophile to notice/care/whine about things like that.. When you get things like MGS4 which they claim fills the 50 GB BD DL without room for multi audio, I get suspicious, but it's mainly RPGs that I care about anyway... Theory goes that Bluray's capacity will help this process along.. It makes no sense to have all that work and just throw it out when it adds value to the game.. How hard is it to maintain a list of audio files j0001.wav vs. e0001.wav? The second .hack series didn't have this option, but you should search online about undubs.. There are people who splice in the Japanese audio into US games.. (Mainly PS2) They are really neat except for when you come across a game that has better dubs than the original like Persona 4.. Igor sounds pretty badass and cryptic in English and like a fruitcake in Japanese.. I only hope Tales of Vesperia PS3 makes it here and with full audio in English and Japanese..

Actually (at least for Canada), you CAN'T buy iPhone apps using a gift card. It's only good for music/TV/movies.. Not sure if the allowance could work for iPhone apps, but hopefully that's just a temporary "iPhone apps are new and it's not implemented" type thing rather than a decision...

I wouldn't want to go anywhere without my wonderful towel

Be careful what sentences you use though

Do you know what all the paging tone songs are? I can only figure out #1 of 8 which is The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel.. I've been trying too hard to figure it out.. Maybe some of those iPhone apps that take the mic input to return a song/artist name would help