It's not as reasonable as it gets. Plenty of other companies are ecstatic with the free publicity of gameplay videos and do not attempt to take any of the ad revenue. That's why it was seen as ridiculous that Nintendo took the stance that it did.

By modern standards Nintendo is an odd duck. Some of the things they do is outright antiquated (and I don't mean just videos) and some of the other things they do are weird. With that said, Nintendo markets differently and their customer base is wider than just "core gamers", so what works for the latter isn't necessarily the right move for Nintendo.

Since starting with Nintendo Directs, Nintendo has started doing a lot of low-key publicity on their own. The Directs are chock-full of gameplay footage (especially near launch time) and Nintendo frequently posts additional gameplay videos. Furthermore Nintendo seeds the press with review copies of games weeks in advance, and lets those reviews be published well before a game actually launches. This means that those reviewers have also put out their gameplay videos well in advance, and have had plenty of time to put them together.

This is massively different from how many other publishers handle promotions, as Nintendo is far more "open" than most publishers. Take the just-launched Watch Dogs for example: not only did Ubisoft primarily focus on cinematic trailers, but they gave reviewers a relatively short amount of time to work on their reviews and didn't allow reviews to be published until after the game shipped. I'd prefer not to be cynical, but when Ubisoft says that it's their most pre-ordered game yet, it's not a big leap to suspect that they are withholding information because it would hurt sales. Which makes reviews and gameplay videos all the more important, as this information isn't otherwise being volunteered in a timely manner.

The point of this being that while the "free publicity" angle can definitely help companies and buyers, the games that benefit the most are the games where the publisher is "closed" and withhold information, followed by indie games where they just outright lack promotion. Nintendo doesn't fall in to either of these categories; they have plenty of promotion and they demonstrate gameplay in a relatively transparent and open manner. Which is not to say that Nintendo should discourage these videos, but it's hard to imagine they gain much from them.

They're aware (one of the editors replied on Friday). However it's a long weekend in the US, so don't expect anyone to be around to replace it until Tuesday.

I don't doubt that the researchers have hit on something interesting, but it's hard to make heads or tails of this article without knowing what algorithms they're comparing it to. The major SSD manufacturers - Intel, Sandforce/LSI, and Samsung - all already use some incredibly complex scheduling algorithms to collate writes and handle garbage collection. At first glance this does not sound significantly different than what is already being done. So it would be useful to know just how the researchers' algorithm compares to modern SSD algorithms in both design and performance. TFA as it stands is incredibly vague.

This is what Sony should have done with the PS4 - let users stream from their old PS3 to the PS4 rather than rely on the PSNow solution they're pushing but I guess they don't have the flexibility of a PC to do that sadly.

The PS3 is not well suited for the task. The PS4 has a dedicated H.264 hardware encoder - AMD's Video Codec Engine - which is what allows it to so easily stream to the Vita and Vita TV and with such low latency. The PS3 doesn't have a dedicated encoder, and heck it doesn't even have a dedicated decoder, as it does a good chunk of its H.264 decoding in software. This is why PS3 remote play to the PSP and Vita never worked well, nor would it work well streaming to a PS4.

In practice, a lot of games did most of their work in the main CPU (a MIPS machine) and the GPU

Minor correction: Cell's main CPU - called the Power Processing Element - was a PowerPC processor, not MIPS.

That plan is for use should Satan rise from Hell. Though I hear that for some inexplicable reason the plan involves Saddam Hussein and a vulgarity-spewing 8 year old.

It's that and a general decline in long distance usage/profits. Before deregulation the bulk of the profits for telephone operation came from long distance, to the point that local infrastructure and usage was essentially subsidized by long distance. Post-deregulation competition quickly drove down profits, and more recently VoIP and other non-POTS communication methods have further erroded profits.

The end result is that the bulk of the cost of POTS has been shifted on to local; you now pay for the cost of your infrastructure rather than the long distance "whales." Which arguably is how it always should have been, however POTS (and callers) benefited from the network effect so much that POTS likely wouldn't have been as successful if every subscriber was paying their own infrastructure costs from the start.

There's actually a row in the results table that more or less answers that question: "Expanded basic price per channel."

That value only went up 2.1%, which is still higher than inflation but not by nearly as much. In other words, more than half of the cost increase from expanded basic came from content additions.

that said, please tell me one sitcom that wasn't designed for you to laugh at the cast?

M*A*S*H, specifically the comedy years. It was nothing at all like the appalling Nerd Blackface that The Big Bang Theory is.

My understanding is that all of the mobile carriers are running CGN these days, so whether or not they support IPv6, they're not consuming much in the way of IPv4 addresses.

Who is the expected user here, and what did they gain by trying to hold on to an existing backdoor so shoddily as to have it detected again?

I think you hit the nail on the head. This is clearly meant to be a remote management backdoor for the ISPs, hence the need to secure it but not remove it. As dodgy as it is, the fact that it can now only be triggered by the local network and can't be passed over IP means that it's probably good enough by ISP and Sercomm standards, especially if it's treated as a little-used feature and not as a security concern.

Well you're comparing phones/appliances to computers, so yes.

Windows has for many years now used a multiple-tier support strategy (the Windows Lifecycle policy). Microsoft supports an OS for 10 years, and during that period if they issue a service pack then they support the previous sub-version of Windows for 2 years. Windows 8.1 Update is about 30% of a service pack; the update contains a number of feature enhancements and on a code level it becomes a "base" OS that all future updates are built against. So unlike a normal security update, you can't skip Windows 8.1 Update and still get other security updates. This in turn can be interpreted as a violation of the Lifecycle Policy, as it's functionally a service pack and therefore Microsoft should continue providing security updates for Windows 8.1 (sans Update) for 2 years.

iOS on the other hand offers no such policy. You are expected to use the most recent version of the OS and Apple has never said any differently, full stop.

Never mind the huge difference between an OS for a disposable device, and an OS for computers that is expected to last for a decade or more and is interfaced with massive amounts of custom hardware and software. Unsurprisingly, the type of device and the expected use case for it is a big factor in how long an OS is supported and how OS updates are handled.

It would probably be useful to specify the order of events in TFS, as the current summary implies they received campaign contributions after they started investigating the merger.

TFA is focusing on past campaign contributions - that is contributions before the investigation, seeing as how the investigation just started. Everyone on the committee has received a campaign contribution at some point in the past, even Al Franken. Which is more a statement on the fact that Comcast pretty much contributes to every incumbent's congressional campaign, rather than this being a case of where these senators were specifically targeted.

Which to be clear, still isn't a good thing by any means. This means everyone on that committee has received a contribution at some point. But it's not the same thing as giving contributions to someone when an active investigation is going on, something that would be far shadier.

And because most of us like Stephen Colbert. It fits under the "news for nerds" criteria.