Yup. "No more load times" is only going to happen once solid state storage sizes are so huge that assets don't need to be compressed, and so fast that it's as efficient to access them from the storage as it is from RAM.

And given that RAM access speeds are always increasing as well, and as storage increases game assets keep increasing to fill them up, I don't see this happening any time soon.

And for small games that don't have these limits? I can download an entire iPhone or XBox Live game over my broadband connection in seconds. Why would I ever want to deal with physical cartidges!?

I disagree I think the major problem we are suffering is that we aren't securing the machines from the get go. The environment is a kludge, but if you don't let everyone run as an administrator all the time, teach them not to click yes blindly to every pop-up box without reading it, teach them not to fall for every phishing attempt under the sun then you don't have to worry nearly so much. Not saying it would be impossible to crack a system, just that you don't have to worry nearly as much. I run a network and am both network and systems admin and I haven't had a virus or spyware incident (at least that i know of ;) hehe) in 4 years, the one I did have at that time was contained to only one machine and really wasn't much of an incident. But I run a tight ship security wise, though most of the users don't know it.

> Surely that depends on how stupid your populace are? If you're dumb enough to repeatedly get caught speeding and not learn from it
> then yeah, they're not going to improve things.

I wouldn't say I have been repeatedly caught, I have gotten one speeding ticket and two that would have been but they did me a supposed "favor" and ticketed me for something else. Either way they get their hour and a half on their time sheet for a ticket (yes they do here in MA) and my insurance company still got to bilk me for supposedly being less safe.

What have I learned? Be more vigilant in looking for pigs on the road. I have learned that my government does the bidding of insurance companies. Thats about it. Overall, I try not to be intimidated by thugs and let them dictate my driving style since, I know I am safe. Just look at my record. Its mostly paperwork violations (because, as we all know, paying $50 to the RMV for a renewal is one of the most important habbits of a safe driver) and speeding stops... the one accident thats still even on my record was when some road raging moron slammed on his breaks in front of me while I was trying to change lanes in heavy traffic, called the police, and went about raving about how I was swerving in traffic because I made one lane change to avoid blocking an intersection at a red light. Seriously.

All they do is enforce laws, whether its absolutely retarded to do so or not.

-Steve

The 2K baseball games are horrible. They are full of bugs and totally unrealistic. I picked up 2K7 out of a clearance bin a couple years ago and in my second game playing I struck out 23 batters. 23 out of a possible 27 outs were strikes outs. No, I wasn't pitching as Randy Johnson or someone like that, I was pitching as Ted Lilly!! If you want a real challenge, pick up MLB: The Show. Overall a more realistic baseball game, and you definately won't be throwing a perfect game after an hour of playing.

I live in the UK, and I know how much tax I am paying. Every single receipt comes with a line item at the bottom indicating the VAT. It is required by law, but so is advertising the price at the till, rather than some number that can be used as input in a calculation to work out how much you will really pay.

When I buy stuff in the UK, I can add up the things in my head and either have exact change, or know that the total is right when I pay by card, when I get to the till. In the US, I have to add city and state sales tax, which means that I need to multiply by two fractions in my head. I can only do that approximately, and the two values vary when you travel more than a short distance (in some, one or both is zero).

It amazes me that Americans seem to treat this is a false dichotomy. Either shops don't advertise the final sale price, or they hide the tax completely. These aren't the only two options, but it's about what I'd expect from the country that invented the phrase 'nickel and diming'.

Yes, the prices came back up but MONEY CHANGED HANDS. The people who owned in the morning are not the same people who own now. I suggest you check your mutual funds.

9" is far from tiny. I use a 1280x800 8.9" netbook tablet convertible and I can surf just fine. Video is great too.
While I think the iPad is ridiculous, I don't underestimate the power of mobility. Lightweight, and a much bigger screen than a phone - A joy for people who only surfed mobile-ly with a cell phone.

Funnily enough, many people ask me if I'm using an iPad and then I proceed to explain mine runs Windows7, multiple apps, flash, DVD drive, USB ports and HD resolution..... Too bad I only get 2:40 hrs on the 3-cell battery tho.

Lots of people by televisions and game consoles. These cost considerably more than $500 and arguably do a lot less. What's your point again?

$500 is an affordable price for a pretty large segment of the population. Couple that with the fact that there is so much software that you can get either for free or very inexpensively and you end up with a pretty cheap device that does quite a lot.

Buy a PS3 or an XBox and check out the price of their popular titles. Lots of games are $50 or even more. When I buy a game for my iPad, I consider $5 to be expensive.

I agree, there isn't going to be a hard and fast answer (at least, not one that's real). However, there is some number of pirates who would have bought your game, which is the real cost of piracy on your game.

The best you can do is get an upper and lower bound on the number, and compare that cost of lost sales to the cost of DRM. I guarantee that's what the game execs are doing right now.

The problem, as /.ers from time out of mind have pointed out, is that Congress is bought and paid for by the telecom and cable TV industries - who are the very folks you're proposing the FCC ask them to regulate here. So - good luck with that.

It's important to understand that the American system of checks and balances is tripodal, and that the FCC is a quasi-independent function of the executive leg of that tripod. Congress makes the laws, but, by design, the executive branch implements those laws. One of the most important ways in which the executive branch performs that duty is by creating a regulatory framework that defines the specifics of how the laws Congress passes will be implemented. And it's absolutely vital to understand that the executive branch is not subordinate to Congress in this regard - and, for the checks and balances system to actually work, all three legs of the tripod have to push against each other. Congress must assert its authority to make law, the executive branch must assert its authority to parse and implement those laws, and the judicial branch must asset its authority to test the validity of those laws. When one branch allows itself to become subordinate to another - as happened with Congress during the Bush years - disaster inevitably ensues (Patriot Act, anyone?). So, in the absence of specific direction from Congress to the contrary, the FCC is absolutely within its mandate to change its mind about how to regulate a particular segment of the communications market in this country, just as Congress would be within its mandate to provide specific direction on the issue (and note my point above about who would most likely dictate Congress' lawmaking in this regard), and the judiciary would most definitely be within its mandate to rule on one, the other, or both assertions of authority.

It's messy, it's frustrating to observe, and it's inefficient as all hell, but it's the system we've got. And, bellyaching from those who dislike its outcomes in specific cases on specific issues, short of a serious Constitutional revamp, the system will continue to sort-of-work this way for the foreseeable future.

I know this is the sort of thing that goes on at black hat conferences, but could this guy potentially get in some sort of legal trouble for demonstrating what he has found?

I would think only if he shows himself, either in pre-recorded video or live, actually performing the hack on a real ATM. At that point, he could be charged under the computer fraud and abuse act. But simply doing a presentation on the topic, with details of the hacks? No, I don't think there's any law, yet, that makes *that* illegal, and any such law would likely be unconstitional in any case (pesky first amendment and all that).

There are 10s of thousands of apps on the appstore hosted by Apple that generate no revenue for Apple. They get nothing on free Apps today. iAds will not be required for free apps, and people will still be able to host free apps even if they use other ad solutions.

Your argument makes no sense.

Nowhere in that quote does it indicate that the accounts were administrator users. They could have been read-only users, or users of a router that was less important in the network.

That is questionable in the quote. They could have been read only users, or else why would they need the router passwords if they already had administrators.

Access != Administrator

Because those applications probably still make a lot of assumptions for running on x86. I wouldn't even think that windows could be compiled to run on ARM in it's current state. There's probably a bunch of assembly thrown in for optimizations. Windows hasn't run on anything but x86 since Windows NT4. A lot has changed since then.