Google bought Dodgeball (which did this sort of location tracking via sms) in 2005. Dodgeball's founder (Dennis Crowley) then created Foursquare. If anybody should be patenting this it should be Crowley or Google.

imagine a beowulf cluster of these! ;)

i kinda wish rorr.im worked for slashdot. :-\ i mean, we INVENTED slashdotting.

i have been using foursquare for a long time and i absolutely love it. playing the meta-game of acquiring badges has motivated me to travel to all new places and discover things I may never have come across on my own. it's fun, and my buddies and i have gone on some road trips to see places we've found through foursquare to great success. if you have an actual social life, it can be great fun to find which bar or club your friends are at on any given night without having to contact everybody directly. it's nice the way it is. i wouldn't want facebook getting their grubby hands on it.

why not FFIV? you start the game on the Red Wings as Cecil!

haven't you seen star wars? if you strike him down, he will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

it's not such a bad thing for the government to *gasp* be held accountable.

i sorta think the author of TFA is looking at a page full of kanji and is equating that to being a busy mess of a design. I wonder if the same exact page, translated to English, would evoke the same feelings.

this is one thing we DO NOT WANT from slashdot's readerbase.

the biggest change this has for me is that it has moved installing adblocking software from just 'something i do for my personal computers' to 'something i do on any computer i touch, even professionally'.

it was the ad server's responsibility to regulate what they distribute. instead, they have just become an avenue for zero-day attacks that can spread across the web in no time at all. since they did NOT act responsibly in preventing this type of attack (really, is there NO review process at all on what they serve out to millions of people?), it falls on us, the users, to protect ourselves. when companies complain about lost revenue due to adblocking software, this is your justification.

gritty!? the new show will be garbage if it doesn't feature natalie portman naked and petrified and covered in hot grits.

(P.S. mods: this is a homage to vintage /., not a genuine troll)

while i realize that there are some positives that can be garnered by war spending, can you imagine where we might be if the past 7-8 years of military budget were instead spent on scientific endeavors such as the space program? if those billions were instead going into cancer and aids research?

regardless, i am glad that even in a time of belt tightening, we still have people aiming for the stars (and not just at other people).

there's two questions here:

1) is GAMING dying?
2) is CONSOLE GAMING dying?

1. no. people continue to want to play games. it will only grow as current gamers grow older and have kids who become new gamers.

2. no. while PC gaming will continue to have its niche market, especially in areas where keyboard and mouse have dynamic advantages (especially MMO and RTS games), console gaming makes modern games accessible to the masses who cannot (through lack of knowledge or lack of money) continually upgrade their PC's to keep up. Consoles give a consistent platform for several years where upgrading is not necessary, and games will "just work".

Sure during recession all forms of entertainment will suffer cuts, but gaming is far from being alone here.

yes, yes it can be worse. (still worth seeing though)