People that think the brain works like a computer, don't understand either of them.

Meanwhile in the United States, the popularity of the "Snuggie" suggests that dementia may be setting in as early as age 30.

Google is hardly some poor little fish lost in a big pond with some big bad guppy bearing down on it. Google can handle itself at this point, no need to drag out the M$ rhetoric again.

Star Wars needs to get a restraining order against George Lucas. That man should not be allowed within 500 feet of it.

At this rate, the next gen of DRM will require everyone in the world with a PC to buy a copy in order to cut off any would be pirates at the pass.

Of course it isn't moral, but the problem is humans, especially humans with an agenda, are not rational beings and will bend/break rules or violate the spirit of a law (or the law itself) if they think that the ends justify the means. I highly doubt that the agents/officials that are part of the prosecution are sitting around laughing about how they sent some fat kid to the slammer for kicks, I would wager that most all of them think that what they are doing is the absolute right thing.

"Hypothesis: making medical records available for data analysis might expose redundancy, over-testing, and other methods of extracting profits from the fee-for-service model"

Besides being perhaps the most ignorant thing I have read this morning, this statement reminds me of the irony inherent in listening to tech people whine about how medical caregivers have no trust or knowledge of IT, while the caregivers complain non-stop that IT has no idea how to design a decent medical record system.

So I should put that 18 in to charisma, and not Intelligence?

I forget, do we like final fantasy in these parts or not?

Final Fantasy, while the very definition of a game series that has been milked for all it is worth, is notable in the fact that almost all of the iterations of the franchise come to a concise ending. Characters die, are rejoined with their long lost whosits et cetera. The Dragon Quest series does this too, although they do tend towards three game story-arcs with a running theme.

Given that the two above series are two of the most successful franchises in the games industry worldwide, I would say "no they don't have to fail, but loose ends are the bread and butter of modern media"

Less a valid strategy, and more an "oops" is what I would guess. Does making it harder to produce games, make better games? Darwin would say so, but then Darwin never saw anything like the companies that shovel out budget level drek, that while low in individual sales, often provide a safer return in the long run than larger projects costing millions to produce. My biggest issue with sony now is, that when games get ported to both the xbox and the ps3, the xbox version is often better and less flawed in terms of performance on the hardware (often is not equal to always) and typically gets better support from the publisher, take Fallout 3, and GTA4 for a couple of high profile examples. This disparity is only going to get worse if the gap between the systems continues to widen.

"Evidence-based medicine is not the norm in the US"

It is, and it isn't

Medical school is all about evidence based medicine, we are told to use nothing but, we are tested on our ability to sift through and select the evidence based answer and are reminded time and time again not to blindly assume against age old axioms and stereotypes. And then we get into the real world...

Many physicians, particularly older ones but there are also plenty of younger ones as well, are married to their classical training, and stop learning or trying to learn after having it beat out of them on the wards. Just as in any other area of life (or science) youth is dominated by the wide-eyed idealists, and the experienced are set in their ways. Add in the insurance companies who have more to say about what tests or treatments can get done on a patient than a physician, and the 80+ hour workweeks for your medical residents, and similar hours for many of your primary care specialists and it really is no surprise that science ends up waiting for the bus.

People are so afraid of socialized medicine, that they don't realize that they already have a particularly bad form of it.

First, I am a doctor, a mere resident, but I still have the letters.

And let me just say that this is crap research. Some idiot is trying to ride the current public hysteria regarding video games into a published paper and hopefully a large bag of money and further funding. One case? Please. This is just lazy. My guess is that somebody is desperately trying to satisfy a publication quota and this is the best the idiot could come up with. I would really like to see the other topics they submitted that were refused.