Doesn't Xbox lose money still?

I just can't take these products seriously. Instead of this niche marketing, microsoft needs to focus on something with broad appeal. There's a reason iPhone beat them in that space, and this is exactly it.

Sure, but people have been speculating about the iPad for at least a year and a half.

Obviously competitors have realized that it's worth it to come out with clone or me-too products much faster than they did in the past with the iPhone. This suggests to me that they'll be at least somewhat more successful than before in taking market share from apple.

On the desert-solar thing, It turns out you need to clean the mirrors frequently, which requires water, which requires energy to bring in since there is little in the desert. It's a big problem.

I have several domains I run on a private DNS server that I access from my house using Comcast. I haven't experienced this. I'm in California if it matters.

I suppose users could tunnel DNS over some other port if they had to.

I'm a Comcast user, and I run a DNS server for a few private domains that only I use. I have not experienced this, and I just verified that it's not currently happening. I'm in California if that matters.

The question is whether there's some product that could be installed for this specific purpose. Laptops with webcams seem like they'd be a reasonable target. Also, I seem to recall something being installed right into the bios to facilitate this sort of recovery. Or even something involving MAC addresses. Most thieves aren't smart enough to change those, and on a laptop I'm not sure you could even really do that in hardware (though I know you can do it in software, on linux at least)

That's sort of the same thing I was thinking. I mean, maybe they should have users that opt in to such an experience before they start degrading it.

It's not just MMOs where sci fi has been somewhat less popular than other genres. It's also true for traditional roll playing games.

I think it's possible that what's going on here is that when people want to play games, they'd rather have it be about something totally out of the realm of possibility, rather than a possible future scenario, which is frequently the goal of sci fi.

You're exactly right. All someone has to do is set up a Certificate Authority and they can basically construct their own private internet from the ground up. Heck, they could even construct their own version of Wikipedia that touts creationism and eliminates or disputes evolution.

I pretty much agree. It seems possible they may have improved the manufacturing process, but once you put a scratch in that baby, you're probably hosed.