How much of this security theater can be solved with a bomb-sniffing dog? Instead of checking each new thing for a bomb and still not being able to find them, a dog can just smell the explosive wherever it happens to be hidden. But no, we don't want to do that, that's too obvious, cheap, and easy. We'd much rather have a 1000x more expensive, incomplete and cumbersome solution.

3g is wireless, and wireless varies on cost depending on coverage. A 5mb connection with nearly seamless nationwide coverage can't cost the same to maintain as a 5mb connection that has spotty intermittent coverage, and that cost has to be passed on. What you suggest is that a speed limited rolls royce should cost the same as a same-speed limited honda civic.

The main issue seems to be in the ratings systems. Game reviews rate games on an absolute scale, not a relative scale. If reviewers honestly rated EA's crap games relative to EA's gems, then there would be a whole lot of sub-5 ratings. However, even a relatively crap EA game, assuming you had never played a game before in your life, is still an impressive piece of work. Consumers would have to start demanding relative scales on ratings before they would help out in selecting a game for anyone but someone who had perhaps never played a game before, in which case any major release correctly would be really impressive to that person... until they play one that really is a 10/10 on the relative scale.

That's easy, many of today's games don't have linear gameplay or a proper ending. I bet lots of people finish games that have level 1-10 and then you win. How do you "win" world of warcraft? Sure, people finish the quests, etc. and in that way, they are finishing the game because the game doesnt have any other "you win" at some point.

Good thing for regular news here in the USA that our news isn't data-driven... it's opinion driven, and you need a person to make up an opinion... or do you? I'm pretty sure someone could generate the fox news content just by scanning cnn's articles and negating all of the opinion statements.

The computer isn't going to die if it doesn't get the right path, the bee might. Death is a remarkably strong motivator to be efficient.

You mean to tell me that in the movie about the time travelling, flying delorean, that runs variously on a fusion engine and stolen libyan plutonium, that there's something unrealistic about the plot of that movie? NOOOO!
haha.

(obviously 10*.3=3 not 10.3)

oh yeah? watch this. A=.3
10a=10.3
subtract a from both sides
10a-a=10.3-.3
10a=10
thus a=1! but a=.3! so does .3=1? This is why I get paid the big bucks. Don't try to do a digit proof that .99999... = 1.

" If you write a script, you're certain that the changes made will be identical on each box. If you're doing them all by hand, you aren't.'"

No... if you write a script, you're certain that the change ATTEMPT made is the same. The changes may very well not be the same, if one of the boxes is messed up, but you can be certain it wasn't because you did it differently on that box. That's the difference between a GUI and a CLI... you get a same attempt guarantee, which allows you to blame the box instead of yourself when management comes asking why it failed.

Most modern game ads on tv still show hardly any gameplay. The Wii will show gameplay, but a ton of other systems' games do not. They just show the pre-rendered payoff sequences. If you're not showing the actual gameplay, you are lying to people. It's that simple.

It seems like an interesting study in meta-creation, meaning in order to create from a fictional work you have to make the fiction that exists into the rule boundaries for your work to be considered part of the same fictional narrative.

If something like this were to happen, everyone could just use "John Smith" as their name and use the same pics, address, etc. on anything internet-facing. Once enough people do this, and it wouldn't take that many, it would be impossible to tell which "john smith" had posted what.

The point is that the company will find some way to try to claw back that investment, and unless you do extremely, exceptionally well on ROI, you will not be rich at all. The truly insidious part is that as you start to make more, the label rigs the ROI against you by taking out more pr and stuff in the name of selling more, when really it just eats away at your profit.

Reminds me of this horrific classic of how recording artists get ripped off:
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html