More or less every day I visit the Raspberry Pi home page to see if there is any new information on when the allegedly-mostly-working Android 4 will be released, and every day there isn't. As far as I know, Broadcom is the holdup. This does not give me confidence in Broadcom...

There's some ugly drama surrounding the collapse of 38 Studios. That has caused baseball's Curt Schilling to walk away from video games and publicly state that it will end up costing him his fortune. Everyone is in a very bad position right now. 38 Studio's top creditor is the state of Rhode Island. Aside from some stranger assets, there is a partially finished MMO called Project Copernicus as well as the source code and artwork for Kingdoms of Amular. So why doesn't Rhode Island seize this source code and artwork? They could auction it or, better yet, give it to the people who paid for it.

Now we all know this isn't going to happen. The source code will be shelved and it is unlikely it ever contribute to society ever again. The people who coded it have been fired and have moved on to the next thing in their lives while the bankruptcy proceedings play out in the news. But if I fail to repay a loan on a car, repossession services come to take the car. If a studio gets $75 million from a state to make a video game, where are the state's repo men to reclaim the video game?

The current situation is unavoidably bad for everyone involved. Schilling is blaming the governor, developers are moving for the second time in two years, gamers are missing out on the sequel to Amular and money is missing everywhere. But most notably each resident of Rhode Island has paid $75 to the video game industry and will likely never see it returned to their pockets. A coworker who thoroughly enjoys the game said that it's RI's fault for investing in such a fickle and risky industry. Maybe he's right? But the game is reasonably entertaining.

So what could a state do with source code and artwork? The obvious thought would be to auction it off and recoup losses. But what company wants to buy up those assets for more than a pittance compared to the loan? The game didn't sell as well as they thought it would, your developers would have to learn thousands of lines of new code, the artists that could expand the art in the same style are thrown to the wind and there's already a polished title out there. To me, the obvious solution would be to instead package Amular and Copernicus (at least the PC versions) as learning software for high schools and universities in RI. Art students could work on reskinning it, developers could work on just getting it built and Rhode Island would at least be able to show its residents something for which they had paid.

Furthermore if RI really wanted to recoup its losses, they could likely make several million back with a Kickstarter project to open source everything from 38 Studios. The only people who might not like this idea are those in the games industry who claim the MMO and RPG markets are already thoroughly saturated. Perhaps the current publisher and those with distribution contracts of Amular would object. But those executives have already taken the citizens of RI and Curt Schilling for a ride so why should RI care? The only downside would be a massive influx of Amular clones on the PSN, XBLA and PC fronts. But this is an opportunity for gamers, Rhode Islanders and open source in general to expand and set precedence that when a company folds all that hard work and late nights with Mountain Dew and pizza should not be wasted and shelved.

You can tell me that this will never happen -- not with Amular, Copernicus or any of the thousands of titles from failed development studios -- because you're right. It hasn't ever happened and it most likely will not. But Rhode Islanders paid for these titles and the repo men should arrive and bring that back for Rhode Island to decide what to do with it. At least those that have paid for it should be able to decide if what their hard earned money paid for should sit collecting dust or live in immortality.

Is there indeed anything we can do about the new cadre of Microsoft astroturfers with modpoints? Is it just time to finally give up. I can't imagine that they haven't actually paid their way in.

I am looking for a large-format inkjet with continuous inking that is suitable for printing poster prints and the like. Ideally it would have both Linux and Windows support, preferably through a standard protocol, but this is not an absolute necessity. What IS a necessity is the ability to install a continuous inking system for making these large prints, and being able to change inks. I am biased towards Epson or Canon but I want good advice, not just biased.

Copyright is not a natural right, and if it had been instituted in its current form (denial of copying, as opposed to forced copying) two thousand years earlier we'd probably be at least a thousand years behind where we are now.

OK, I know AI is hard (no pun intended) but are there any strategy games out there that don't cheat on any but the lowest levels? Haven't tried Civ V yet, but IV is just another case of easy easy easy IMPOSSIBLE to me... I just can't muster the interest to outsmart a computer program written to cheat against me.

I want some continuous servos. Should I buy or hack? What's good to buy if I just want to do that? Double-BB and metal gear would both be nice.

I would like them to be informed that they are douchewaffles. Even the whole sign-in/password recovery system feels like something running on a 3270.

The trial is two days, so I didn't want to start it, and now I've removed it for disk space, and probably won't bother to reinstall. Let this be a lesson to you, limited-time trials are for fucking idiots.

From Dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange to corn even rats can't eat, Monsanto wants you dead.

Fantastic.

Let me count the ways... I just want to uninstall a game, I don't want to update Steam. I need that disk space back now, not tomorrow.

They solicited me several times to go to expensive dinners I can't afford, and now they want me to buy "which mitt" mugs. Is it a plot to attempt to drive me to the republican party? It's not going to work, I'll vote third party this time no matter what.

Here's your chance to do something for the web. When a story is posted that requires javascript, JUST SAY NO.

Requires Javascript;Didn't Read. FTW.

Fight back against douchewaffles like Gawker Media who don't understand the web.

I am getting tired of your popups, and the fact that your facebook app does not support https makes me laugh at your notion of security. I dub thee douchewaffle. Time to look for another free antivirus. Will not recommend Avira for corporate use evar.