That depends on which way you are crossing and if you are a citizen of the nation your are crossing into. If you are an American citizen then the laws about search and seizure do apply so there are some limits. That said I don't think that these would in all likelihood violate those limits.

They lost the time value of the revenue over 18 months. If you were smart, and anticipated it, you paid the debt *and* collected interest.

960GB of RAM should be enough for anybody!

Pretty cool huh? it shows in clear to you, but stars to us!

I don't know about you, but I think the "shot in the arm" PC gaming needs is a serious divergence from console gaming in terms of titles, but it needs to take a big cue from console games in terms of fitting game design to the platform at hand.

Here's a useless antecdote: Need for Speed Shift just came out. Yay me, I love Need for Speed. So I bought it for my PC, which has an SLI pair of not-to-terribly-old nVidia graphics cards and should be pefectly capable of playing Shift. Surprise! It doesn't work. Presents me with a cute little "shift.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close" dialog every time I try to run it. Tried reinstalling video drivers, changing driver versions, updating Windows, reinstalling the game, reinstalling Windows entirely. No go.

Meanwhile, the kids with their Xboxes (those that aren't red-ringing) and their PS3's (that may have cost a zillion dollars) can just stick the disk in the drive, press power, and play the damn game.

Why can't we do this with PC games? Every major PC title I can think of in recent years has suffered from a pile porting, control, stability, and feature issues from launch, some of them continuing to this day. (GTA4 on the PC, anyone?) PC gaming needs to diverge from the "blockbuster title" mentality of current console games, and more importantly break away from just being a pile of (usually lousy) ports of games that are already available on consoles. I should not have to hack around, troll forums, download patches, and sacrifice a chicken to my video card drivers just to be able to play a recently released game. And when I get it working, I should not wind up with a lousy watered-down console port that isn't optimized in any way for my hardware, limits my control schemes, handles mouse and joystick input all weird (if it supports mouse or joystick input at all!), yet is still somehow incapable of playing online against the version of the same title running on everyone else's console.

Games need to be tailored to the hardware. And not just the video hardware or operating system or what have you for speed and stability, but to the control hardware (mouse and keyboard), display hardware (high resolution monitor relatively close to the user), and operating environment (running along with other applications, probably competing with torrent, IM, browser, and other software).

Pretty much the only outfit doing this properly is Valve, with the Steam platform. Steam is (relatively) stable, the Source engine runs on all kinds of hardware, all of the Valve designed games on it are designed foremost for the PC taking advantage of mouse-and-keyboard, it plays nice with other applications running alongside it, and it provides a community, downloadable content, free games, updates, and other shit people actually want via its network connection and not just more DRM (though it has that, too).

As much as it pains me to admit it and as much as I liked Bioshock, Fallout 3, Grid, NFS: Carbon, etc., the last game I really had a good PC gaming experience with was Half Life 2. Well, that and Plants Vs. Zombies. But you get the idea.

Forget the hardware. Let's get the software right.

Persistence of Vision is a ray tracing application that has a cluster version - that was used for a while for demoing and benchmarking the performance and scalability of clusters. It's a damn fine way to demo a Beowulf cluster, and if you actually need a bunch of images rendered it is pretty nice once you have it configured and running.

I did exactly that for a project in school a few years ago. It was pretty sweet demo, and it felt good to finally have built a Beowulf cluster of my own.

Actually, you are mistaken. Breaking the law does not make you a criminal. There are criminal offences and non-criminal offenses.

If I remember correctly, you CAN make a modern violin sound just as good as a Strativarius, but it takes extremely meticulous work to build such a violin from wood. I believe that Samuel Zygmuntowicz in Brooklyn, NY is one of a very few select people that could pull it off; indeed, it takes nearly a year just to build ONE Zygmuntowicz violin.

Now, I wonder why nobody has bothered to equal the sound of a Strativari instrument by building one out of all composite materials such as carbon fiber, epoxy resins, advanced plastics and aerospace-quality ceramics....

Thank you. I understand. As many times as I read the sentence I kept interpreting it as "dropping OPENSTEP / Obj-C for [i.e. in favor of] Windows." Was that before or after M$ dropped a bunch of dollar bills on Apple?

The screens are aluminum reinforced tempered glass. I know you're thinking that the glass would shatter, but the overall construction is MUCH, MUCH stronger than a typical PC display in terms of protecting the inner glass of the display. The hard drives all have sudden motion sensor technology to park the heads during quick impact. That's meant to guard against the impact of actual drops, so getting snapped shut is nothing for them. If they broke, it was for some other reason. Nothing in the vid would have resulted in more than case scratches.

Fixed that for you.

By number of physical devices or total amount of space? What if I've got one big CF card and several small USB keys? And what about my iPhone, which has 8 GB of mostly unused space because I don't put media on there and can't otherwise use it to store files easily? (Dear Apple, WHY can't I use my iPhone as a mass storage device like most (all?) other iPods?)

but what about disabled people? I would think that the obstacle would cause big probles with wheelchairs and walkers.