Can someone please explain this sports analogy with a car analogy so I can understand it?

I think a pizza analogy would be more appropriate.

Hey. I've got a brilliant Idea. Let's construct a thermonuclear fusion reactor at the center of the solar system. We will collect the radiation energy with photovoltaic cells pointed to the sky. As there are no moving parts, it wouldn't require much maintainence either. Why hasn't anybody implemented such a brilliant idea?

Where are you going to put said photovoltaic cells?
Photvoltaics have poor efficiency. I think I saw, maybe here on Slashdot, that the very best cells are 19.3% efficiency. Since you claim there are no moving parts, I suppose you're not going to try to mount them on some sort of Sun-tracking axis either.
The pollution argument is probably a moot point too. IIRC, the manufacturing process for photovoltaics is rather toxic.

Actually it probably wasn't a good idea to mention that the Wiki is served off a SheevaPlug :P

Oh well, at least Slashdot will give the little bugger a good work out.

Or because you have a child or a spouse, and you damn well do care that you spend some time interacting with them regardless of how much fun you might have doing other things. "Work/life balance" isn't about "work/fun balance", it's about having responsibilities to other people than just yourself and your boss.

That analogy is not exact.

The real analogy would be if that guy, next to the free billboard for you, ran a billboard for himself.

I think everyone agrees that such behavior would be...erm...outrageous? And that you should get a cut of the profits from that other billboard?

Right?

If you like the Halo-like FPS games, there's always Marathon through the AlephOne project at source.bungie.org.

It is still nice to play after all these years and the AlephOne team has done a fantastic job of expanding on the multiplayer capabilities as well as changes to the UI.

Ironic turn of phrase considering Stalin's Agricultural policies. Maybe it isn't "capitalism" but "humans."

What worries me most is that since a lot of xbox 360 games assume they are played on HDTVs, they have fonts far to small to be read easily on standard definition hardware. This move seems to be somewhat encouraging people to play on SDTV (most won't bother to check which cables are bundled with their console), despite it being really uncomfortable in any game with a significant amount of on-screen text...

QFT. I've got a couple of games in my library which are particularly bad offenders (Mass Effect, Army of Two, I'm looking at both of you). The situation is alleviated a bit by switching to component (I'm lucky enough to have an SDTV with component inputs), but small screen fonts + composite looks absolutely horrendous.

Playing those games with a composite connection was enough for me to turn off the 360 and turn on the Wii after about 15 minutes.

I'd like to know how many of these HD users are even configured correctly.

It seems like the vast majority of casual gamers that I know have never even managed to configure their consoles correctly for high definition anyway. For example, my cousin who had a 46" plasma TV with an Xbox 360 connected via composite and running non-widescreen.

Maybe console makers should provide an idiot-proof method of configuring the screen before they push HD so hard.

Google *paid* Sony to pre-install Chrome, just like Symantec pays for Norton bloatware to be pre-installed on HP (etc.) notebooks. There seems to be a sort of OEM market here; for years already. Nothing to see here; move along.

First off, there are cryptographic protocols which don't involve one-way-functions. Consider one-time-pad, for example.

Secondly, the bigger mistake you're making here is presuming that a lack of absolute security is a lack of security. Security isn't a binary predicate: something that you have or don't have. You could just as easily argue that you don't have any security because there are human being who run the programs and control authorization and human beings are fallible. Really, the lack of cryptographic primitives which can be proven secure without any assumptions (other than one time pad) is one reason why there's no such thing as absolute security. Other reasons are human fallibility and the impossibility of tamper-proofing.

These don't mean that there is no such thing as security, it just means that security isn't an absolute. Security is about risk mitigation. A proper security analysis looks at the likelihood of different things happening and the cost to the system if those things do happen and uses this to calculate an estimated risk (as best as we can). The goal of security is to minimize the risks. The goal is not to eliminate all risks because eliminating all risks is not possible.

I've got to patent the tweeting toilet

Nah... prior art. Sort of. Obligatory Penny Arcade Twitter Comic.