All of the articles I've read about this seem to confuse DNS and BGP. My guess is that the IP of one of the root dns servers was being "hijacked" by the Chinese by announcing a route to it and that route was being picked up externally so some people thinking they were using the real dns root were being diverted a chinese root server giving out different IP addresses for lookups on these domains. Does that make sense?

Correct. Anyone who says that a kilobyte is 1000 or a megabyte is 1000000 is simply ignorant.

The guardian? Don't make me laugh! They are probably the least objective newspaper in the UK. They have a huge agenda of pushing public services and the taxes to pay for them

If your camera is going to record a vast amount of data only to throw away 90 percent of it when you compress, why not just save battery power and memory and record 90 percent less data in the first place? ..

Because it's hard to know what is needed and what isn't to produce a photograph that still looks good to a human, and pushing that computing power down to the camera sensors where power is more limited than a computer is unlikely to save either time or power.

So it can do "up to 20km" per day. Well we all know that means that any you actually get will only manage 15km as the 20 will be without stopping, with no lights or radio on etc... And on a dark rainy winters days lets say that will drop to 10 km. And you've got to get there and back so that's 5km away you can get if you want to come home. Plus who will risk running out of power half way home? So you'll never risk more than about 3km away from home. SO great, a car that if you charge it up all day, you can get to places almost 2 miles away. Handy :)

No, actually they are simply pandering to the "Waaah I want it NOW!!!" crowd who complain so loudly. it's ruining WoW, I suspect that the next expansion won't be nearly as successful as they hoped, I know an awful lot of people who are still playing but don't plan to buy the expansion as they don't like anything the game has done recently and that will be a suitable time to stop playing for them.

My title sums it up really. Wow in particular has ceased to be a world full of adventure and exploration and has rapidly become just a game full of people who complain if there is anything to do that slows down their getting their loot. The whole game has shrunk from a huge world full of adventure into a tiny game with about 10 instances and raids that people do over and over and over, and complain if there is anything that slows that down. Many other games have followed WoW down this route, and yet I think it's success was despite that, not because of it. The other games may well be "obscure" but that doesn't mean they don't exist or they are no fun to play. Does it matter is there are 3 servers full of people you'll never meet in game, or 200?

it isn't supposed to benefit the consumer. It's supposed to benefit their bottom line. Which in the long run, benefits the people who want a better, more diverse range of games to play.

It's the same thinking as paywalls on news websites - we aren't making enough money now, even though we have x customers. If we add a paywall, we'll only have 0.y *x customers, but at least we'll have enough money to stay in business and provide them content. The users who pay may even get a better experience this way if they make more money doing it.

Why would customers be happy about it? Well if I'm paying for a game, and getting the same experience as someone who pirated it, and they represent 19/20 players, and then they start to add DRM which gimps the game to keep those 19/20 people out (and still doesn't work) I'm not exactly feeling like their strategy is pro customer. Now though, they're saying things like 'free DLC when you preorder' well really that means you're paying $60 for the DLC and the the game is free because you could have pirated it and just had to buy the DLC, but at least I feel like I'm not stealing their stuff, and I'm getting something out of paying money. UBIsofts system is bad because it punishes you for having bought their product. The EA system of DLC is good because it rewards you for paying for the game, but if you won't pay for the game or DLC elements of it, you're not getting the same experience as someone who does. The Sony thing is half and half, they're just advertising it badly, not that I can think of a better way. Buy our product, get free multiplayer, don't buy our product, pay for multiplayer! But then I suppose they have the problems as EA and their DLC - you can still get the rest of the game for free, or a lot less used/pirated.

Your story reminded me of a particular class in college where technology was used appropriately in an English class.

It wasn't recommended for us to use laptops in class; we used pencil and paper for notes for the most part (though computers weren't explicitly banned from the classroom either; I did see a few idiots checking Facebook every minute during class.) However, the professor was fairly tech savvy and had a USB voice recorder slung around his neck at all times. He would record his lectures and put the audio recordings online for everyone to listen to (yes, even for the public, though he also used a robots.txt file so the website wouldn't get spidered by Google.)

When we turned in essays, it was all through email in Word format; him and his TA's then used Word's annotation feature to grade and edit our papers.

But he didn't use this as a crutch! You see, my professor insisted on reading every single essay (though he had let the TA's grade the midterms), and insisted on grading every single final. There were at least two hundred people in the class; it would have been insurmountable for him to grade and read all of those essays by hand.

We still had in class discussions, group discussions, and all of the other sorts of face to face interaction without having to rely on bulletin board software.

For those who are college students at the University of Washington, the class is called "Method, Imagination and Inquiry", ENGLISH 205/CHID 205. It's taught by Leroy Searle. I highly recommend the class to anyone in any discipline.

"The biggest problem with Microsoft is badly-written software — the operating system allows you to write software badly unlike Mac or Linux."

agreed. — what?

The NY Times print folks need to learn from the same lessons the leadership of the Dallas Morning News learned a year or two back - namely that news consumers do not consider the print and electronic versions of the paper equal or interchangeable substitutes. That is, there is far less crossover in each of the customer bases than the newspaper execs or the conventional wisdom might suggest. Unfortunately, if the print folks win out, they will learn this lesson the hard way.

Free DLC should be considered an added perk for buying the game, not something that should be taken for granted. Steam is doing far more damage to the second hand market than EA can do at the moment.

Any multiplayer game that requires a login to play (going as far back as Diablo II or Neverwinter Nights) would have also had this restriction, meaning the seller would need to give up his Battle.net, Bioware ID, etc... for the new buyer to be able to play online.

I am all against restricted copy protection and DRM. EA have always been fairly rubbish at supporting their own games anyway. Free DLC should be considered a step in the right direction.

I agree 100% I saw some "expert" on TV the other day who was saying that yes, there has been no measureable change whatsoever in climate over the last 15 years. And that yes the changes in the 10 years before that were entirely consistent with small changes throught recorded history and nothing special. But _that was entirely conistent with what the global warming models predicted_ and we should all panic now. Yeah, right. Frankly the whole thing is getting embarassing.

The whole article depends on this statement which is presented without any evidence, and in fact I don't even have any clear idea what it even means?

Eventually advertising will evolve into information, companies with products will go direct, they won't need go pay Google to reach them

It all seems rather unlikely, I can imagine someone slowly taking away google's advertisign business but I don't see that advertising will suddenly disapear which is what this article seems to be based on

Yes, you are right that they do this for ensuring compatibility.
As an example they do not let Flash to run on iPhone, iPad etc. to ensure compatibility... compatibility with their pocket of course