If a thief were really after your data, it'd be pretty trivial to remove the hard drive from the laptop, and just have to worry about encryption.

This feature won't help protect your data really, just make laptop itself a paperweight.

Move out of America, and magically the same model phones won't drop calls. It's not their fault, it's the huge size of the continental US combined with the overall ineptitude of the major mobile carriers here (AT&T/Cingular, I'm looking at you)

Some people maybe have to back up rather large sets of data. Piles of CAD drawings, raw video edits, renders... Some stuff is too large or numerous to fit on just a laptop, USB key, or online storage.

Just my guess. I can't imagine how much it would suck to try to do an online backup of 500GB.

It effectively makes it likely that retailers will completely stop advertising or using ESRB ratings, since it is the least costly way to ensure they never run afoul of the new legislation.

Then the people ragging against video games can point out that retailers don't even follow the ESRB ratings, and claim that the self-regulation clearly is not working, and try to get even more harsh, government backed regulations in place to fully replace the ESRB.

As far as the bills official intent, it seems pretty fail. But it has potential to encourage, and perhaps even achieve, the bills proponents' eventual goals.

Without walmart to sell AO games, their potential market is excessively small. A 'real' game sold as AO would fail. The AO games that do get sold are most likely small companys just making porn games, not AAA blockbuster games that happen to have too many tits.

Aside from being wrong about M rated games, op's assumption about AO rating killing a game's sales is correct. Walmart's retail pull in the US is enormous. An AO game would still find buyers, but not enough to be a super hit, unless it gets a unique streisand effect going for it. But even Postal2 was just M and did not see many retail outlets.

Last, and coincidentally every time I checked since the ESRB rating started, Walmart has carried and sold M rated games. Never an AO though.

M = Halo GTA RE Gears Bioshock Resistance, etc, etc.

We're too stupid to use Celsius in the USA. But you knew that, right? Water boils at like 212 degrees Fahrenheit, freezes at 32.

Your 42 * 9/5 + 32 = 107.6, which is a bit higher than the op was talking about.

How do you prevent some other shopper from buying the items you wanted before you arrive there, or prove that such did not occur?

Also, how do you prove that their computerized inventory is infallible?

Instead of letting the renters do that, or even working a deal with non leasing home owners who are behind, for months leading up to the crash almost one in every five radio commercials I heard in DeKalb IL were about people getting awesome deals on repossessed homes, with super low monthly rates.

But if those low rates were offered to the old occupants, I bet they would not have had to move out...

Even from a greed standpoint, that kind of crap didn't seem to make sense to me. Wouldn't it have been cheaper to cut the original owners the deal, instead of repossessing and reselling at the lower monthly rates? And paying for advertising about the low rates? /boggle

That's true, anything s/s or LAN would not be counted, I think people have pointed out that bungie did not try to include those games in their numbers, so they are celebrating the 1 billionth xbLive matchup..

It would be pretty awesome if they could write some software that takes the person's dna sequence as input, and outputs one of those composite picture of you made up of pictures of you things. But I guess some kind of fractal pattern is the best one could really hope for.

And only 15-20% outside the lines.

72,203,447,307.2 games. Roughly quintuple that if you include non-Source CS.

Fail. Overshooting their stamina.

I assume that while Halo3 probably runs matches on one of the clients, rather than running a server, the lobby/game searching feature is probably centralized.

Thus they don't have to monitor anything except some count made by the lobby server that keeps track of how many game match-ups it creates that get played.

So like McDonalds can check receipts, I'm sure MS can check server logs, and probably this is automated for them.