Really?

I wouldn't have recommended it to kids because it's pretty difficult and frustrating.

I thought Mirror's Edge did a pretty good job at making you fail a lot and feel very dead when you did so.

Data, sure, but the summary did at least specify information.

With IWnet you have a choice between private game (i.e. you provide everyone who is playing) and pickup match and if you all join from the same lobby, you get put on the same team. A private match wasn't an option, there were only five people who had the game.

It's not that they were trying to stack the teams (we're not actually that good anyway!) but IWnet gives you no other choice.

Gone are the days when we could all just jump on a dedicated server and balance the teams. Gone too are server rules like "No team stacking".

IWnet really does leave a lot to be desired.

The same thing that everyone who moved from XP to 7 gained.

Windows 7 is nicer to use in almost every respect. The new taskbar (which is the best use of desktop compositing I've seen), the improved Alt-Tab window and the searchable start menu are the things that jump to mind most readily.

If we're talking about real, demonstrable gains, the move from 2000 -> XP was far more questionable.

I will happily admit that I can only comment on this from the user's perspective, I don't know what changes were made between Windows Server 2000 -> 2003 -> 2008.

I saw MW2 played at a LAN at uni a couple of weeks ago and I have to say I was unimpressed.

The lobby and matchmaking service is pretty nice, allowing you to form a party and then look for games where you can play on the same team, a pity it doesn't work so well in practise. You're stuck with the problem that a large proportion of people leave as soon as they see several people bearing the same tag join the game meaning that you have to go through the matchmaking process several times. Then there's the more technical problem of the game sometimes leaving some players behind when the lobby joins or leaves a game.

When you actually get into a game, there's a small chance that the dynamically chosen "best" host will be terrible and have huge lag spikes. (This while we're all connected through the university JANET connection.) Eventually the game decides to migrate the host, everything stops, a new host is chosen and then the game continues. Then the host quits because his team is losing and we go the the "Choosing a new host" screen again, and again.

This must be some definition of "works really well" that I was previously unaware of.

and then Halo 2 came out and showed how much worse it is when everyone has voice chat.

No, dipshit, they're anonymously aggregating data about filesharing to give to Universal as part of a deal they made.

This sort of thing is probably valuable to them since it's likely to be more accurate and complete than the stuff gathered by MediaSentry and their ilk.

Do you really think they believe the ludicrous numbers they've been putting out? Wouldn't they want to know the truth themselves, even if they keep it hidden?

Important passwords should be long, random and not written down.

For each password, make up a set of cryptic crossword clues, preferably making obscure references to things from several different aspects of your life.

Additionally, make them really evil cryptic crossword clues that don't quite give you enough information (but enough to jog your memory).

Sure you do. It happened. Everyone else saw it.

The best you can do is remember it and learn from it.

PhishTank is a crowd sourcing site which merely samples the opinions of their users which makes it accountable to... no-one?

Netcraft does not consider it a phish (although you have to use their toolbar to check that.)

Incidentally, the spreadsheet is suddenly gone so I suspect someone at Google is reading Slashdot.

My personal anecdote about the unreliability of fingerprint scanning comes from the Science Museum in London.

When I was there several years ago, they had an interactive creative exhibit where you could save your creations by identifying yourself using your fingerprint. I had to go through four fingers before I found one which wasn't incorrectly identified as belonging to someone else.

While this is only an anecdote and the fingerprint scanning system was designed for a relatively unimportant scenario and probably matched against a large number of fingerprints it has always made me wonder about the uniqueness of fingerprints.

An ordinary scam (like the Habbo one listed above) is different from a phishing attack (which requires that the attacker impersonates another entity).

You have absolutely no hard evidence (other than your own experience and cynicism) that the site collecting Habbo logins isn't doing so for purely honest reasons and will only use them to deposit 500 credits in each account submitted.

This comes down to a matter of trust. If you trust random people on the Internet, you're going to get screwed over.

I think in this case it is unreasonable because they solicit review submissions on the same page. When you submit a review the impression is given that it will appear with the other reviews for the product.

This is markedly different to promoting positive trade reviews (e.g. putting the PCFormat Editor's Choice logo on the page for a piece of software that received that accolade).

Have a look at this article from torrent freak (complete with update saying TPB is back on the results page):

http://torrentfreak.com/google-removes-pirate-bay-frontpage-from-search-results-091002/

Sure, unless getting everyone together is difficult or expensive.