It's only in cleartext during installation, and only while the password field has focus. This is hardly something to get up in arms about, unless you regularly re-install your OS in front of a crowd.

I have to second this. I had been looking to upgrade an aging 1600x1200 LCD for a while, but the only affordable monitors I could find were 1080p and I really couldn't justify an "upgrade" that actually lost me vertical resolution.

I finally picked up a U2412M last year, and have been extremely pleased with it. Thinking about grabbing another to replace the mediocre Hitachi serving as my 2nd display.

At least here, they're going after someone who was systematically and deliberately distributing copyrighted content, rather than just some poor kid running bittorrent.

Of all the things to complain about. The necessary tools are readily available for purchase.

How about the Nintendo DS? Speaking from personal experience here--I've written (or ported) several DS homebrew projects.

Sure, there's plenty of emulators, and ports of popular (and less popular) classic games. And the obligatory linux port, not that it's useful for much besides bash and ssh.

But there's plenty of original games too. There's also ebook readers, music and movie players, utilities to backup retail game saves, drawing/coloring apps*, music creation tools, and more.

* One of these, Colors!, later became a rather successful commercial title for the 3DS.

I had the same reaction to Unity as most people... at first. When I first upgraded to 11.04, I found Unity annoying to use, even on my touchscreen laptop.

However, they've been steadily improving it, and to be perfectly honest I rather like Unity as of 12.04. The Dash is slick, the HUD is a great new feature, and I've always been a fan of the more minimalist window managers anyway. My only significant complaint is that I refuse to give up sloppy mouse focus, which renders the global menubar completely useless (so I reverted to the old menubars).

In an era of "Secret Questions" and facebook, we really don't need to worry about passwords. Those SQs are the bigger problem

This. I will occasionally put in long strings of random characters for websites that ask these questions, and just accept that if I ever legitimately forget my password, the account is gone forever.

That's a great way to describe the situation. Wish I had some mod points.

My personal machines are all named after characters from the Commander Keen series.

At my last job we used Warcraft III heroes. At my current job I used Transformers, until we hired a full-time linux admin who rotated those out in favor of boring functional names.

ubuntu is to debian as firefox is to gecko

Nobody uses Gecko directly. Debian isn't just a good base for building an operating system, it's a pretty good one already.

Turns out the AI didn't and can't. From a different article on the tournament:
The showcase game of the competition was a bot versus human match. In the exhibition match, =DoGo=, a World Cyber Games 2001 competitor played against the top ranking bot of the competition. The result was an exciting man versus machine match highlighting the state of the art in real-time strategy game AI.

It's also worth noting that this =DoGo= isn't really the top-tier player the article makes him out to be. WCG wasn't a huge deal back in 2001, and =DoGo= went 1-5 in his group then. I'm not sure how much he's played recently either.

First, make a homebrew/hobby developer package and sell it. . . . Say, $1500-2500 or so. [The] release mechanism . . . shouldn't be free. . . . Homebrew releases should be prevented from generating profit for the programmer. . . . The homebrew developer would pay Sony's QA costs

Yeah, I can't imagine why anyone would try to jailbreak your system if this alternative were available.

There's also a small, but very dedicated community of MOO2 players. Check out #moo2 on irc.quakenet.org

There's nothing to stop companies using phones as a wireless controller with a built in display, and built in storage. You can use the phone to display game elements distinct to your character, and to store your save games.

Sounds an awful lot like a Dreamcast VMU.

I thought with the Wii you needed to know a person in order to play against them (I don't have a Wii, so I don't know). But I thought you had to get someone's ID# in some fashion (generally -- by corresponding w/ them) to add them and you couldn't just do a "find me a random opponent"....so if you are playing against people w/ hacked games, just go to their house and tell them to stop.

You can play against random opponents just fine. What you can't do is chat with, message, or "friend" another player unless you have exchanged Friend Codes with out-of-band.