When did 'reverse engineer' become something you are and not something you do?

Not because I care enough to use it to try to protect the 'sheep'. But I know that somebody will.

I can't wait to be at Starbucks when a socially awkward 17 year old stands up triumphantly to save the day by alerting everyone that there is a 'Firesheeper' in the building hijacking their cookies!

When YouTube videos won't play on mobile devices such as iPhone, Android, etc... I've found it's almost always caused by the content producer disabling "embedding" of the video.

1. Allocate computer time to cancer. 2. ??? 3. Cure cancer!

Although it didn't seem like anything great from the summary, I went ahead and went to the article and watched the videos.

I found it very creepy. The way it handled the towels and turned them while 'looking' for the next step. It was reminiscent of what I felt was a child learning to fold towels (although, I'm fairly certain the robot wasn't doing any learning). For whatever reason, and despite it's appearance, this robot seems more human than any other robot I've seen previously.

I'm no fan of Flash, but there is no denying it's market penetration.

Sure current flash sites might not work perfect, but if you are developing for the iPhone, Android, Maemo, etc, I'm sure you could take into account the unique interface and make it work properly.

Saying it's not possible never moved anyone further. Computer science, especially gaming, is an industry built on finding ways to make things work on resources and interfaces they shouldn't work on.

I see a lot of comments here comparing the "First Sale" profits of video games to cars or TVs or other physical utilitarian devices.

The main difference, in my opinion, is that in the first year of owning a car or TV, only the first owner can get value from it. In the first year of life of a game disc, 12 people can get value from that one disc.

I don't think you'll see Bungie, Epic, or Infinity Ward complaining about this. They've figured it out... you sell people the game and give them a great multiplayer mode (or some other reason) to hang onto it, and they will. Used copies will be few and far between.

The people who are really suffering are those that make truly fantastic single player games. Prince of Persia comes to mind... it was great, I thoroughly enjoyed it. All 20 hours of it... and on my schedule, that's 5 days of having the game to do 100% of everything there is to do. So I rent it. I actually rent all games that have no multiplayer aspect. The only games I purchase are the ones I can see myself playing online still, 6 months down the line. You might say make the games longer, which is an option, but I personally don't WANT to invest more than 20 hours into any single player experience, and to be honest, when it is longer, like 100+ hours for a Final Fantasy game, you spend most of that time not having fun, just trying to level up to do everything.

This applies to DVDs and to a lesser extend music as well. One DVD can easily fully serve a group of 20 people in one week if they pass it around and watch it in groups.

I'll leave you with this... I think more than the disc, game companies, movie companies, etc are selling you the experience. The experience of playing through the game or the experience of watching the movie. And I believe they should be compensated for each experience they provide. I do think that $60 is a bit much for a video game, but I think it's to compensate for rentals and used game sales. Once everything goes digital, we will see a shift. Let's say that for every 1 copy of a new game that is bought, 2 people probably play that disc, on average, could be more or less, not sure. So $60 provides 2 play experiences. The publisher sees approx $30 per experience in this model, but assuming the first copy was $60 and the used copy was $55. That's $115 spent, and Gamestop probably paid the original owner about $25 for it, so they paid $35 for the experience. If the second owner sells it back very quickly for $25, then he would have paid only $30, bringing this in line with the above of $30 per experience. So $65 spent total for two plays, or $32.5 per experience. If the publishers had complete control over this, the players could have each spent less money for the same amount of, or more (because they get to keep the game), game.

However, it may be be a utopian thought to think the publishers would pass these savings onto us completely, I like to dream.

Seriously, tilt control for bomb disposal robots? I hope that is a joke or an assumption and not actually true.

I've never personally owned an iPhone, but I work IT on a college campus therefore have the device shoved in my face literally multiple times a week by students and faculty wanting to show me the new game they just got from the App store. And from what I can tell, the accelerometers are barely accurate enough for simple games, much less expensive military robots.

Even a Wii Remote, which one might consider the "top of the line" in consumer grade accelerometer technology, isn't ideal. If your going to control something remotely, changes are you are going to want something that has a spring or some sort of mechanism to return it to neutral when no pressure is applied. Having to guess how the accelerometer is calibrated and hold the device neutral is far less than ideal.

One of the stipulations of the fair use clause of the copyright act is:

the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

I'm not sure what the test is for, but I can certainly see how posting any of the questions of a test, wherein the questions aren't already known, greatly decreases it's value in the eyes of test givers.

I really hate this phrase. The more I see it used, the more I'm convinced it's just people trying to sound smart.

If correlation never implies causation, then every study ever done is invalidated.

Sure you can take something and twist facts any way you want to make something correlate to something else, and in that case, sure correlation does not imply causation. And perhaps an initial correlation does not imply causation, but typically warrants further investigation and studies. But when you have a studies that take years of data, good, large, samples, and some generally smart people doing it, saying "correlation is not causation", especially without any argument or justification, is just silly.

Parent is either +1 Funny or -1 Troll.

Technically this downtime already brought GMail down to 3 nines.

The first constitution does not apply to services provided by a company. This woman isn't going to jail, she's been removed from a service provided by a company.

Microsoft isn't really concerned. They aren't going to lose any significant number of customers over this. There isn't going to be a backlash. Nobody is gonna care.

It's just some person wanting express themselves everywhere and realizing that they can't win every battle. If more GLBT would learn this lesson they would probably be perceived better by the general public.

Mod parent up.

I've seen this too many times, especially in laptops. A failed fan or detached heatsink will do it on desktops and laptops, but also a broken heatpipe on laptops.

If the user uses their laptop on a cushion or something that cuts off air flow, it will get so hot that it can completely evaporate the liquid in the heatpipe and then the processors gets almost no cooling and the heatpipe permanently ceases to function. A good test is to use the laptop fro something taxing, then check if you feel warm air coming out of the laptop exhaust or not. Warm = functioning heatpipe, cool/room temp = broken heatpipe. No air = malfunctioning fan, lol.

Also check the fins on the exhaust, getting clogged up with dust can lessen the heat dissipation and cause the processor to enter the slow failsafe state.

Most laptop manufacturers provide detailed disassembly diagrams for their laptops, and you can commonly find a replacement heatpipe for less than $20, even you've only ever worked on desktops, most laptops aren't that difficult to work on. Give it a shot if it's out of warranty.