Remember when businesses had to make better products than their competitors in order to compete, instead of continually suing them? Yeah...that was nice.

I've got to wonder why Bill Gates put Balmer in charge, to begin with. Could he have picked a worse candidate? I can't help but think that some office accountant who actually does real work on a computer (rather than just imagining how to change everything, and make it "prettier") would be a much better choice.

I changed the search settings in IE today in Windows 7 clean install, and I can verify that if you want to change your IE search engine from Bing to anything useful, you have to scroll SIDEWAYS (?!) through pages and pages of junk (specialized search engines that help you find stuff you don't care to find in any case) in order to find a real search engine of any kind--and that's even including things like Yahoo. If you want to find Google, you have to be VERY diligent, or use the tiny "Search" box above the list, then NOT select Google News, Google Shopping, etc., but rather the actual google.com search engine that's buried in the middle of them.

Oh, and alphabetical order? Not so lucky.

...especially the bit about the services.

I believe that this is largely a symptom of our government and culture demanding short-term "results" with regard to anything that we spend money on. This is fine for consumer goods (buying a computer or gadget at a store, for instance), but in science--where is where innovation seems to take place pretty exclusively--these huge, "going-to-the-moon-type" achievements are built on many, many smaller achievements that, themselves came out of many, many failed attempts at making something work.

We didn't develop our space program just because we succeeded once, in a really big way, but because we developed thousands of supportive technologies in the decades and centuries preceding that achievement. (We couldn't have reached the moon without the Greeks keeping track of star movements, which led to telescopes; we needed an industrialized society, which required the assembly line, and the invention of gears, levers, engines, etc. before that. The list of such examples is much long to post here.)

Essentially, without spending a lot of time and money on things that *might* work, but also *might not* work, we couldn't have gotten as far as we are. We could have gotten *much* farther if we'd not adopted this ideal of having every avenue of research pan-out either in the short term, or in the foreseeable long term. Similarly, Thomas Edison tried literally hundreds of different materials to make his "electronic lighting device"--while everybody told him he was wasting time and money--before he invented the light bulb. In our present investment/research culture, funding would have been pulled at around filament attempt number 20, because it was getting too "costly." Of course, the multi-billion-dollar industry of electric lighting would not exist right now if it had been.

This short-sightedness, which seems to be based around a buy-(research)-and-receive-(results/products) business-like culture that will ultimately see us (the USA) left in the dust by other nations that are willing to risk significant loss in return for possible gains down the road. I dearly hope that we end this trip-toward-obsoletion before the USA becomes synonymous with a lesson about short-sighted greed and instant gratification.

Just my 2 cents (that I personally think are worth more...of course).

(I realize this article is referring to stereoscopic 3D, but this is as good as any chance for me to rant about this.)

Does anybody else think, like I do, that they completely ruined Super Mario Brothers by going 3D? I don't think they've come out with a truly good 3D version of a classic platformer...ever. Maybe there's some exception I don't know about, but I think they ruined most console gaming when it went 3D.

Don't get me wrong; I love games like Crysis 2, Doom 3, Half-Life, etc., but we've really lost something by deciding that EVERYTHING has to be 3D.

[end of rant...for now]

While I don't honestly think they're in the same category, since they -were- lumped together (which probably says something about a shortage of actual gamers among the judges), I suppose they had to pick one or the other...

Fallout was a much more complex game, with a lot less linearity, and more options for the player. In that sense, I can see how most would find it to be more entertaining, and possibly more artful. On the other hand, Myst was absolutely DRIVEN by the art (watch the original developers' commentary if you don't believe me--I don't think any but a VERY dedicated artist would blow bubbles into the bottom of a toilet bowl through a straw, but for a singular dedication to artistically stunning sound effects), so I think that for those who DID really delve in and enjoy playing it, it was far more artful than Fallout 3. There just weren't as many such people as there were for Fallout 3.

So far, the original Myst has lasted the test of time better than any made-for-3D game ever has (if you recall, 3D was added some years after Myst's sequels started coming out), and seems to have a much stronger cult following, to boot. In 10-15 years, I think that we'll just look at Fallout 3 as a lesser shadow of Fallout 5/6/7 (or whatever they get named). Admittedly, I've played a lot more 3D stuff in recent years than I have of classics like Myst and Deus Ex, but I can't remember half of the newer games I've played, and will probably cease caring about the others before long, when new-and-better/prettier games come out...but since Fallout 3 is a heck-of-a-lot more popular now, I'm sure that had something to do with the judges' reasons for putting it over Myst. ...Not that they should have been in the same category, anyway.

I think I can agree with most of the games on this list. I definitely think that Myst deserves a big reward for how utterly innovative it was at the time (especially graphically!), and I'm glad to see that they're at least putting it on display for folks to play. I can see why they chose Fallout 3 over Myst. I have to wonder, though, how fun it can possibly be without spending several hours immersing oneself in it? My dad and I worked on that game over the course of several months, scratching notes, diagrams, and drawings in the provided(!) "journal." Man, those are some fond memories.

My only major beef, though, was the inclusion of Doom II. For starters, the original Doom was much more innovative for its time, and I had a LOT more fun playing it than I ever had with Doom II. The real travesty, however, is that Doom II beat out Deus Ex, of all things! Not only was Deus Ex a much more beautiful game, artistically (in terms of music, video, story, etc.), but there has yet to be another game that truly so masters the FPS-with-RPG elements that Deus Ex so deftly and artfully included. I think that this is truly one of the best games of all time, despite how dated the graphics were when it was released (although still prettier than Doom II, due to better hardware available). I'm REALLY hoping that the up-and-coming Deus Ex sequel isn't the hopeless disappointment that Deus Ex 2 (Invisible War) was.

Doom II was truly a good game, but I never thought it was nearly as fun as Doom 1, and it certainly can't hold a candle to Deus Ex.

Another article you may be interested in: 30 Games to Play Before You Die. It's a bit dated (2009) but at least they got the first game right. :-D The others on the list are certainly all worthy of the mention. It might not be the first thing I recommend a terminally ill person to read, but I think a gaming enthusiast would be missing-out on some great, classic fun, were he/she to not at least give it a glance.

Way to go, Mozilla, for standing up to these tyrants! I might just write Mozilla an email, congratulating them for it.

As for the take-down notice itself...having never heard of the add-on before, I've just installed it. Good job, DHS guys! (Who says they don't promote freedom?)

Although this is only like an iPad in the most ostensible sense, I still find it amazing for its time, given what it can do. Really, we still don't have a fax device (i.e. one that you write on and it prints to paper on the other side) that can do anything like this. Sure, we have email, scanners, etc., but this sort of device could be really useful for when you have to fill out a lot of hand-written forms and such remotely. Despite the advent of PDFs and other formats with fillable fields, some forms in use by the US government and various businesses still require actual handwriting. This would also be great for editing a hand-drawn design cooperatively with somebody on the other end. Even though you can do that on a computer, through various input devices, I still find pencil-and-paper far more intuitive. This could also be very cool for messing with D&D and other RPG character sheets if you're teleconferencing an RPG session and aren't using a virtual tabletop. (Some games still aren't supported, or are supported badly. Also, some people just like pencil-and-paper over digital formats for its easy customization and erase-ability.)

Does anybody know why this hasn't been made into a modern equivalent? Was it ever put into production in the 19th and 20th centuries? More than the device itself, I find it amazing that most people have never heard of such a thing, other than its distantly-related tablet PCs and similar. This would have been of great service during the various war efforts before the digital age, and still may be of some use in situations where it's impractical to power a computer or similar (such as in a 3rd-world country where electrical communication lines could be established but power is unreliable--just insert 4 AA batteries!). Given some good encryption, this could have been/could still be used as a sort of Enigma device where practical.

I wonder if those who can easily afford to have 3 drinks a day (but who don't over-imbibe) largely fall into the same demographic of those who can also afford decent medical treatment (in places where there isn't decent universal health care).

Here are some links to (1) a really nice, (and not *too* pricey) arcade console controller for USB; and (2) a modern gamepad with a port for plugging in original Atari controllers.

http://www.viperlair.com/reviews/misc/input/misc/xarcade/dual/index.shtml

http://www.geekalerts.com/usb-retro-arcade-controller/

While the "coffee" machine in the summary may be long gone, it is not without descendants!

BEHOLD: THE FUTURE!

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Coffee.html

Now your computer can actually MAKE coffee!