And lutfisk *shudder*

A personal union with the same monarch and foreign office. Separate administrations and constitutions. NOT one country.

Speaking somewhat from personal experience even if you want, wish and are able to do a good job, or better than what you are doing, interlocking levels of bureaucracy and departmental hierarchies will kill whatever soul and will to live you might have.

My experience is that such useless employees tend to accumulate in middle management making life miserable for workers and customers alike. Not to imply that there aren't useless employees among workers or higher administrators; it's just harder to hide incompetence when you either have to do actual work or make actual decisions.

PC Perspective may have broken the End User Licensing Agreement, a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and probably annoyed OnLive to no end when the site borrowed someone's beta account for a detailed write-up on the performance of the service, but with the testing done far outside the beta's supported area, the write-up has caused no small amount of controversy.

The final, production version of OnLive promises to adapt to your Internet connection and location every time you connect, but for now each beta account is linked to a single OnLive location, configured to your ISP and the client you're using. "If you change any of these factors, OnLive Beta may not even run, or if it does, the lag and/or graphics performance may render games unplayable," the company explains. "OnLive will try to detect these conditions and warn you, but when you are using OnLive in a different location, you are not providing us with usable test data." The fact that Ryan Shrout was outside that area means, according to OnLive, there was no possibly way to give him a good experience. "The reason location is so critical is because of the speed of light. If you are more than 1,000 miles from an OnLive data center, then the round trip communications delay ('ping' time) between your home and OnLive will be too long for fast-action video games." It's also a matter of optimization for your particular situation. "Your Beta account will only connect to the data center it was originally assigned to. So, if you are assigned to our West Coast data center and then try your Beta account from the Midwest or East Coast, you'll find the lag impaired to the point where most games are unplayable. And, depending on how your Beta account was configured for the characteristics of your home ISP, you may see degraded image quality or controller/mouse performance on a different ISP."

We heard from many beta testers after our story went live, but few were willing to speak on the record... for the obvious reasons. One user did agree to give us his take on the service, provided we keep his anonymity.

From the Ars article.
Seems like the Ars article mentioned it and specified that their comments was from ONE beta tester.

Don't know what you mean by "obsolete", but I got Bioshock during christmas sale for about 4.67€ and Dead Space for 6£, both gave me a good gaming experience I would say, and both, at least Dead Space, is relatively new. A mate got Arkham Asylum during the same sale, 33€ (I think it was) down from 49€. Personally I don't buy second hand games, but I'll happily buy games when they have a discount on Steam.

I don't think I have used a library since high school. Currently I average about a dozen books bought each year, maybe a few more, some hardcover and some paperbacks. Most of my friends with an interest in literature average about the same.

As for e-readers I would claim that the main problem right now is that it's still a new technology lacking proper refinement. I have no doubt that over the next couple of decades the readers themselves and the underlying tech, software and services will drastically improve. Feel fairly certain that by the end of this decade I will have purchased a reader and use that for much of the literature I'd be interested in. The current level of readers on the market isn't quite there yet for me to get one, but as I state; I feel certain that they will get there eventually, at which point reading "books" on e-readers will become commonplace.

As a Norwegian I would say that what you descripe is more or less what we have here; Social Democracy. Interestingly enough when it comes to land rights all land ultimately belongs to the nation; yet individuals and companies have various rights to use and administer the property. The only place I know we have something like a HOA (Home Owners Association) is for appartment buildings/complexes and what they can or can't do is severly limited by the confines of the law. As far as lawn goes I have not yet heard about anyone having to maintain theirs in any particular or mandated way. Property value is of course interesting, but enforcing arbitrary standards for appearance isn't part of our way of doing things.

Duh, Paranoia 101; The guy was obviously a covert operative from Microsofts Intelligence Service put there to discredit views that criticize Windows. As my conspiracy teacher told me "Never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by malicious intent from our evil alien overlords!"

As far as organizing and accessing schedules and course information it definitely have. When I attended university a few years back we used It's Learning a lot. It gave us access to the lecture notes, sub-forums for specific courses, ability to send messages and organize study groups, listed possible sources of material, and we could deliver our papers through the system as well. All in all that I would call that a definite boon for many students.

Of course I would happily claim that computers, as regards to incorporation into lectures and classes themselves, could be done better. At the present time I think one of the major problems is a lack of good software tailored for the job. Interactive Educational Software is in many ways a new thing, little resources are dedicated to researching and developing such tools, and few good examples exist to day; Immune Attack apparently being one of the exceptions. In the end, I believe, that it is a matter of technological progress, and perhaps some generational shifts among the teaching staff, before computers can truly become an enhancing part of the educational process.

As I understand it for a Ramscoop type system you want those hydrogen atoms. However a ramscoop is meant to travel at sub-lightspeed. Presumably for faster than light you might want something that phases out, teleports, or whatever; to avoid hitting a small meteor and getting a large hole in your ship (I am presuming that hitting a rock at 500.000 m/s is bad).

That's class warfare! It's the duty of the working, and middle, classes to absorb the risk and losses, cushioning the rich against potential bankruptcy. After all it's the corporations and banks that make the world go around! (and soon they'll demand a nickel from everyone for every rotation).

On a totally unrelated note I am going to live on fat and sugar from now on so I can get Too Fat To Die!

I find the growing field of interactive education, or educational tools, interesting. Personally I have do problems believing that a well constructed narrative combined with virtual tasks of various types; can help stimulate the mind. Such a system by mimicking mechanics of games and other forms of entertainment could potentially be able to keep the attention and focus of a student for far longer than a single teacher could ever hope to.

Projects like Immune Attack can be helpful in increasing our understanding and I wish the developers luck in developing their next program, whatever it might be.

Here is the link to the game.
They are asking for donations for "ll monies that are donated are returned to game development and further research in the field of learning technologies. And "Immune Attack is free to download for educational purposes."

And one could add that the more people that use Linux distributions, and the more that buy support from people proficient in the development and maintenance of various systems and distributions; the better it is for Linux in general.