Wow, obviously I meant "games" not "gays". I wish Slashdot had an edit feature. :)

Bioshock is/was an amazing game, one of the few gays to truly elicit an emotional response from me while playing. It remains the only game I've unlocked every achievement for on the 360, as I wanted to find everything in the world. The play-through where I doggedly hunted down every audio diary in the game really made me a fan, as once you hear all the stories being told (with excellent voice actors) by the end of the game, you can actually start to feel very sorry for the splicers you have to kill. Bioshock is more of a tale of tragedy, less so of vengeance and war, which is what most of the FPS genre is about.

A special mention also has to be made for Sander Cohen, who is one of the most memorable game characters ever. Playing through Fort Frolic still creeps me out, and the audio diary with him reading his poem "The Wild Bunny" is one of the most chilling pieces of game audio ever.

I think you mean 802.1x, not 802.11x, which doesn't exist, as far as I know. :) Any ResNet system worth its salt should also have the ability to allow your device past authentication based on its MAC address. Security obviously isn't great there, but you have to do those things to allow Xboxes, PS3s, TiVos, and all manner of other devices to connect.

I love it when Slashdot can't post an accurate headline. This is a flaw in SMB 2.0, which is present in Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and probably Windows Server 2008 R2 as well. This is not new to 7, it's a common flaw in all the implementations of SMB 2.0. XP isn't affected because XP can't speak that protocol.

Uh, by default on modern incarnations of Windows, accounts without passwords are *not* allowed to log in remotely. So, they're extremely difficult to access remotely.

I think Top Gear is on a mission to destroy all those Morris Marinas...

You might also want to check out Goozex. You trade your games to other gamers for points there. If a game is 500 points, you get all 500 points, and Goozex.com gets a buck on each transaction. It's not perfect, as you'll sometimes have to wait a few days/weeks to get the game you want, or for someone to want your game, but there's not a middleman making $30 off each used game transaction.

(Yes, that's my referral code in the Goozex link) :)

IANAF: (I am not a Farmer, but I do live in Iowa) - Uh, the kind of corn you buy "on the cob" and the type turned into ethanol are not the same. Ethanol is made from "field corn" aka Yellow Dent corn. It's not something you want to eat in its raw form, and it's harvested by combines. Corn on the cob is made from sweet corn, which is not used for making ethanol. Popcorn is yet a third kind of corn... Now, the prices of various crops can affect the prices of others, but it's just because farmers may decide to plant fewer acres of soybeans if corn prices are high, or vice versa. In short, ethanol is not stealing all the sweet corn away from the Jolly Green Giant. I picked up 4 ears for a dollar at the grocery store, and ate them tonight.

Um, you're kind of forgetting the hidden cost of roads... I think the public pays for them too. :)

This is the way BIS works. The reason you get great battery life out of a Blackberry is that RIM's server is hitting your POP/IMAP server and checking for mail, then it just pushes it to your Blackberry as needed. Compared to running a Windows Mobile phone with your IMAP connection being live all day, the battery & traffic savings are enormous. The downside is that you have to share your username & password with RIM, unless you're using BES, which is what enterprises who worry about giving out their passwords do...

I found a bug/cheat back in the day on my Genesis. I read in a magazine about some game that'd glitch in a cheating fashion if you put in Altered Beast, waited for the title screen to come up, then yanked it out with the power still on, put in the next game, and hit restart. I didn't have that game, but I tried it with Strider, I'm not sure why, but it worked! You now had unlimited lives, but you had to play on the hardest difficulty setting! That was actually the first way I beat the game, though... I know, this sounds like one of those stupid things you hear someone claim worked, but doesn't, but truly, it worked! And I never fried my Genesis doing it, though the Genesis certainly didn't seem happy about having the cartridge ripped out in mid-load...

Yes, but satellite internet pretty much kills any possibility of internet gaming, other than turn-based games. Wikipedia says it adds 500 to 900 miliseconds, which, erm, would suck.