That's just a knee-jerk reaction from the legal department.

MS Employee 1: Hey have you heard? They hacked the kinect to do some cool stuff.
MS Employee 2: Sweet
Lawyer 1: HACKED? THEY ARE HACKING OUR SYSTEMS, SUE SUE SUE.
Laywer 2: S&D tube one: fire!

Once they all got the memo that the hardware guys built the thing to be toyed around with (and seeing the hardware in the thing, they make some profit on it, selling it for $150, add that to the fact that it only has authentication for use with the xbox, and outputs unencrypted data), they issued the statement that they were allright with it.

Cool thing about the Kinect is that it gives developers a platform, combining thinking power. Everybody can hook up a couple of cameras and some leds to a computer, but now this 3D sensing thing has a standard and everyone works with the same thing, pretty much like when they were hacking away with the wii-motes, which Nintendo didn't object to either (and sold them some wiimotes, with no harm done to the system itself). Microsoft just tries it that way, and I hope that more companies follow suit. It's out hardware damnit, I want to do with it as I please!
I'm thinking of buying one for myself just to toy with it, but can't really justify the price just yet though :/

Also, most eee's sport a multi-touchpad (atleast my 901 does), you just scroll with two fingers (if you install the correct drivers, don't go with the ones from the ASUS site).

Yeah, you need a subscription for 100$ a year for xbox development, but that's in a sandboxed (managed) environment, and you get around 1/3rd of the Xbox' CPU power (while you have full access to the graphics hardware).

As a student, you can get both subscriptions for free through the Dreamspark program, and I've been devving away on the xbox for a year, and now for a month on my phone with having paid 0 dollars to Microsoft (even got the phone for free from them specifically to develop on the thing).
Also, a single subscription to the developers thing gives you the ability to unlock 3 phones, and that will last as long as your subscription lasts.

Well you can forget buying a videocard with a HDMI/DVI output then (HDCP = DRM enforcement). Same with DVD's or Blurays, or pretty much all games for that matter.
Also, enjoy your shiny DirectX 9 games, since both Vista and Windows 7 have a protected path for DRM video files.

Then again, hardware based DRM is useless if nobody uses it, since the content has to be tailored to that platform. Just get your video from somewhere else, with the protection stripped :).

My Nokia E71 (And I guess the E72 too) can run for about a week with moderate browsing, and about 4 days if you use it to listen to music, browse the web all day and use wifi. I also think it qualifies as a smartphone since it can run 3rd party apps, has GPS and can browse the internets.

Unlocked means that the phone has been registered to a developer account at the marketplace (and can run unsigned applications).
So you either have a dev account (tied directly to your name/credit card), or you have jailbroken the phone with chevron WP7 (which requires a cert from their site which has been removed at the request of Microsoft).

Wake me up when they make something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ahoqR6OGdM&t=134s

And radeon 9800 LE (4 pixel pipelines) to the radeon 9800 pro (8 pixel pipelines).
I softmodded it with no problems, got quite the performance gain. A friend with an identical card (same brand/same chipset and bought within a month of eachother) got artifacts from about half his pixels being garbage.

That same softmodded card still works today (I gave it to another friend so that he could play BF2), while the crippled card of my friend is long dead.

Sure you can 'upgrade' it that way, but unless you stress test it first and make sure it works properly, will seriously shorten it's life by putting a heavy load on components that were already declared dead.

You get a lot of stuff free if you have a valid windows license though.

Outlook Express, the free thing that shipped with Windows XP is revamped to Windows Live Mail. I've used it for a while, got office 2007 (for free through some random student program) and switched to outlook for things where there is no web interface (Exchange webmail is horrible (and broken in some places) in anything but IE, and I don't have the time to install web access to the mail address of my webdomain).

You can always get Thunderbird if you like something free, and for people buying outlook: usually it's in some office package from work, or they know how to use it from work and like to do that at home. Not really smart, but a problem?

You stuff the netbook in your backpack, and then connect a random bluetooth telephone.
You could either have one of those stupid in-ear things, or something like this (http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/8928/).

Server farm services farm servers.

I'm pretty sure there is a barn somewhere with a bar, using something provided by the USDA.

I think something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvLCnKqYWzA&t=2m5s (4 screens with each different difficulty level, you obviously only play on 1 screen.)

Also, protections that cripple a game aren't that new, I've had DOS games totally glitch out (intentionally) because it was cracked.
Of course those protections were broken the minute it was known, and it bothered nobody, and with everything so easy piratable on the DS I guess the developers had to do something.

This would be newsworthy if it gave vuvuzela's in legit copies, but this is just a non-story.

MSE is the only anti-virus ever installed on this windows install.

I wipe most of my XP boxes every 6-8 months (and install from an nlited clean XP SP3 disk), due to clutter from certain programs, and I really make sure to never have installed two different anti-virus packages on the same install of windows.

Still thanks for the tip though.

The worldwide number of FB users is equal to the number of US citizens.

So there is plenty of Americans who don't have a facebook account :).

Microsoft Security Essentials regularly freaks out on my x32 XP box. It just crashes, causing 25% CPU usage (which is one hardware thread on an Atom 330).
The mouse still responds, some programs respond but explorer usually locks up, along with everything becoming horribly slow.
Killing the process fixes it, and MSE pops back in a couple of minutes, and then works normally for the rest of day.

Without that flaw, you could say it's just perfect. Doesn't take a lot of resources (even on an atom), is free with a valid Windows license, and keeps your system pretty much clean.

Tell your friends :)