'It would be like forcing car manufacturers to take responsibility for bad drivers.'" The government used to require car makers to include dashboard lights to tell drivers when to shift their manual transmission in order to get better mileage.Indirectly, in that other methods could have been used to, but they required car makers to help drivers get better mileage with some technique.

This is exactly right. Responding to terrorism is incredibly profitable. It hasn't cost the military/industrial/government sector a cent; it has enriched them enormously, both financially and with political capital. If the terrorists didn't exist, we would have had to create them.

What do you need actual chemicals and stuff for, not to mention rulers and paper clips? Why not just a "My Science Kit" app, and do virtual experiments? Although I guess you could drop the PC on your foot or something, which could also be dangerous.

I saw a headline yesterday that said "Do WII Controllers Look Too Much Like Guns?". Yes, that must be the problem. It's Nintendo's fault, not the people who left the loaded gun on the table near a three year old. They'll probably be sued.

I failed five times in a row, then I read the article. It says humans can "learn" to tell the difference between the series, not that they can tell immediately. However the quote says "It's not hard to see why. In feedback sessions, the players say that the real data was smoother than the randomised data or vice versa and that these patterns were easy to spot after a few goes". So it sounds like people actually don't know how they're recognizing the patterns. Actually, I'd bet you could construct data that would fool people if you superimposed a few random series with different periods, say: quarterly, weekly, daily, etc.

What bothers me about even 60 fps is when you move quickly in games. If I spin quickly in place, I can make, say, a small object (a bird in the sky, a tower, or whatever), move across my screen a distance of maybe 15 inches in about a quarter of a second. That's 60 inches a second. At 60 fps, every time that object gets redrawn on my screen, it's hopped across an inch of space. So even at 60 Hz, I get the sense that it was HERE, and HERE, and HERE, but not at any of the places in between, because those pixels never got turned on. Not sure if that's the same as blur (would blur just draw a blurred line across the entire screen?). But it's why I feel like I want more fps.

Before getting too paranoid about google analytics, take a look at the actual cookies it stores. E.G. in Firefox "Tools", "Options", "Show Cookies", search for "__utmz". Whoa, there are a few hundred. Check out the one from Slashdot - in my case: "9273847.1252068577.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)". "9273847" means "slashdot.org". "1252068577" means me, when I go to Slashdot. The rest of the stuff has to do with how I found the site. But now look at __utmz for say, pennyarcade.com: "84531096.1252070740.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)". It's a different web site ID, but it's also a different user ID. There's no correlation between the person who goes to slashdot, and the person who goes to pennyarcade. Google can't tell that they're both me. My ID is different on every single web site that uses Google analytics. The only purpose of the ID is so that, for a single given website, they can tell the difference between one person visiting it a hundred times, or a hundred people each visiting it one time. There's no other personally identifiable information tied to that number. Your analytics cookies on all those sites are not correlated with each other; they're not tracking everything you do.

My initial feeling is that this sounds like nonsense: the word "video" in "video game" pretty much implies that vision is required. However, maybe he's asking for something that's not too unreasonable: a better brightness control, or a high contrast mode, or a way to limit extraneous detail, or something that might not be incredibly hard to include as a part of all games, and that would open up the whole are of video games to people previously unable to experience them. I'd have sort of a hard time arguing against that.

I also wonder about the legality. Unless the upgrade explicitly warns you that a feature is being removed, it seems that they're taking back some of what you bought. "Upgrades" are generally to fix things that the manufacturer wasn't able to get into the initial release that should have been there, or to fix dangerous bugs. If you bring your car in for a recall and they fix a problem but also remove the radio, you would certainly have grounds to complain and presumably recover damages.

That's exactly how I interpreted it too. DRM: "the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated".

Since the subscriber has no control over the amount of data sent to him from a site (ads, flash videos and music that play automatically, etc) it's hard to see how people would be willing to accept a pricing model that charged them for data they hadn't asked for and didn't want to receive.

Haha sucker - all I had to do to hax your system was telnet in to it. I'm deleting all your files while I'm typing this messa

Seems to me this problem basically solves itself. Once it's possible to make computer generated images that can fool anyone, there's no longer any reason to use real people. It becomes incredibly cheaper and safer to use computers. So it will no longer necessary to distinguish which ones might be real, since virtually none of them will be.