The original Starcraft didn't have any hotkey mapping at all.

The failure rate is much much better now. No one will deny there were problems on release and for some time afterwords.

The HD format thing kind of sucks. But you know what? If you want to game, the 360 is great. In fact, I would say that it's fantastic. If you enjoy the game selection, then you'll enjoy a 360. Cause it works. It's a goddamn console. It plays games before anything else.

The mass of practice questions with solutions and answers which are usually (as much as we bitch, the error rate can't be much higher than ~2%) is plenty of value. That's pretty much it.

I rather my professors and TAs not spend their timing creating 100 practice problems a week.

Though granted, its totally overpriced.

It's vaguely like Windows 7 with a side bar instead at the bottom. And kind of a start button.

There's some screens below.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2010/10/ars-reviews-ubuntu-1010-wip.ars/7

How could this possibly be modded interesting? Do you really wish to flog yourself to death? You know all those reasons why you couldn't just stop buying chinese goods for the last 5 years? Well, every single one of them still applies. The damage you would wreck upon yourself, especially in the short term would be orders of magnitudes greater than the damage caused by a rare earth metal shortage.

Perhaps if you suggested a more limited or symbolic ban/tariff then it may work.

But seriously, everyone knows by now that China and American are stuck. Breaking out of the current relationship would fuck both of you up. And China has way more slack than the US does to fuck around and be an abusive boyfriend. And everyone saw that coming to.

Article (and doctor) says that it's powered by a plug that inserts behind his left ear. Does that mean he has a power cable running from his head to his chest? How did they implant that? I somehow doubt they made an incision the whole length. Did they run it along a blood vessel? They also said the implant itself fits into the left ventricle. So is the pump basically just powering half of heart, and relying on residual pressure to work the other half? If he's suffering from muscular degeneration, does having an external source moving what's left of the muscles result in any complications? The graphic (and explanation) seems to indicate that the implant is just pump that forces blood through an inoperative heart. Presumably that's enough enough to work the heart valves.

So many questions!

PM is defacto head of state. Queen is actual head of state, but since our Queen prefers to live in her palaces in one of the other countries she lords over, we get her governor-general to sign everything for her.

GG and Queen is largely ceremonial, though they actually do have some actual power. Recently, our PM asked the GG to prorogue (end) parliament early. It would have been within her (our previous GG was female) to say no (and a lot of wished she did). Turns out Harper had a devious plan of bugging the Queen to overrule her GG if she actually did say no. That would have been something remarkable to see. Probably the most the Queen has used her power in any official capacity in a long time.

And we don't need a monarch to come up with "pointless bullshit". Your army actually spends money making sure their unit crests are heraldry correct according to rules made up by bunch of old Europeans back before guns ever did anything useful. Think about that.

This is nothing like the gamma knife, aside from that it uses radiation. They're using an MRI to guide a physical probe through the brain to the tumor where the probe then does a thermal discharge. So instead of shooting intersecting deathrays (very cool stuff by the way), they're sending a guided killbot that gets right up close.

You are aware that Android also "kinda" has a licensing fee? The Google app stack (including the Marketplace) is only accessible if you pay Google and extend a branch for them as they keep fall- wait, what?

The source tapes were from Australia. The highest quality video from the moon landing were in Australia. Since they decided to land on the moon early, the US was under the horizon, so they transmitted to Australia instead.

Dude. They're still pumping out Bold and Curve revisions that are nothing but spec bumps + the trackpad. All this other crap? It's on the side.

I know a looot of people who work at RIM. They all know that they have to keep the enterprise market locked down. But that's mostly to do with the BES. Hardware wise, they've already long surpassed what "enterprise" needs. To keep growing, they NEED to grab some part of the consumer market. All that RIM growth the last couple years? That's just been them leveraging the hell out of BBM and selling them to college students. That's not going to last at this rate if their hardware doesn't keep up.

And Iridium is still working. After the original company went bankrupt, all the assets got scooped up for 25 million (a bargain!) and now the company is happily making money. They're even planning on the next set of sats to replace the current generation as they start to age/fail. There is still a market for these devices, though most of the time its people/groups renting out units for a month or two instead of continuous subscription. Though I'm sure there are some mining/gas exploration companies and the like who have a bunch of these.

You're seeing a moving halo effect. Most tone-mapping processes have trouble with dark on light transitions. Basically, in an attempt to 'smooth' out the transition between lightening/darkening, you get the lightening effect bleeding from the dark regions to the lighter regions creating a halo. If you watch the starting sequence with the buildings, if you look at the right side with one building in the foreground, and the dark side of another building in the background, you can once again see the halo effect. Just go google around HDR images, and you'll see it everywhere. It's very hard to get rid of, and simply put, if you run any tone-mapping process on default, you'll end up with them.

It's basically the result of the software not being able to tell with confidence where the boundaries between higher/lower exposure is, so instead it assigns an approximate that "plays it safe" in one direction, and then smears out the boundary. Basically photoshop's magic selection wand + feathering.

You can get HDR to look 'fine' or whatever adjective you want to use. It's just hard. The tone-mapping software/settings that many people use will just go and create doll skin and haloes everywhere. But if you do everything well (hard work!) you can get some really cool looking stuff. For example...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/swakt1/2322363690/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/swakt1/2322366898/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ten851/4972637653/in/pool-hdr

Somewhat like many other art techniques, when best used, you barely notice it at all. And that is the most important thing to remember. HDR + tone mapping isn't just a technology, it is an art. Being able to capture video in 3 different stops at once is great, but it'll still look like crap unless you treat it with respect and give it the effort and time needed.

Remember, HDR + tone mapping is just trying to create a low dynamic range image on a low dynamic range display that LOOKS something like what your mind perceives in a high dynamic range environment. Obviously, that's kinda hard, especially since the human eye can change its sensitivity as it focuses on different parts of a scene in real life, but not really when looking at a computer screen or print.

They already have a weapon similar to this. It's called a HARM (High Speed Anti Radiation Missile). They were developed/used to take out radar sites. Similarly, they can be used to take out radar jammers (at least theoretically, I don't know if they ever have) since they operate on the same frequencies. So if you could tune the antenna/software to the right frequencies, then you can now go after communications jammers (and assuming some sort of IFF).