Jungledisk was really great until Rackspace bought it and killed development.

Small (closed source) client running locally handling the encryption, caching and allowing mounts via webdav, fuse & something-windows. proof of concept open source client for the remote storage in case Jungledisk went tits up. Pay for your storage direct to Amazon S3. Linux, OSX, Windows clients. Supported both mounting remote storage or syncing local folders.

But RIP, thanks Rackspace. There have been murmurs on there blog that indicate things might be starting up again, but no mentions of Linux at all apart from when things won't work - the Linux client hasn't been updated in years and stopped working fully with Ubuntu around the same time (no GUI client, so configuration and installation practically impossible). I thought they would have just taken the large user base (at one point, I think they claimed their users in aggregate were the largest users of S3) and pushed them away from S3 into Rackspace, but the project just went dark from *years*.

You get more games targeted at your hardware. You are quite correct that most of us existing PC gamers are not going to buy a Steambox for maybe the next 5 years or so because we effectively already have one. But we will certainly benefit from the increased market share. It will also be good if the PC games needing a controller are targeting a standard one.

On the flip side, console owners may start expecting mouse and keyboard support for games that benefit from them. It will be interesting to see if games stop being 'dumbed down' for consoles and instead the optimal controls for the game design are chosen.

Because it is demonstrating clearly that the system has become ludicrous and needs to be fixed. It demonstrates to everyone that it is impossible for the current system to be fair, and the game is rigged in favor of the people able to obtain real estate physically close enough to the exchange and afford the systems capable of doing millisecond trading. It demonstrates that it is impossible for investors in Chicago to compete fairly without resorting to fraud or breaking the laws of physics.

This.

Lots of games do beautiful, interesting & open worlds. Not many games go beyond 'run around killing things' as their core gameplay.

Check out the trailers for Zeno Clash or Zeno Clash II. Gorgeous surreal visuals, what looks an interesting story. Just don't bother buying it, as all the fantastic world building has been pissed away on a game where you run around punching people.

I wouldn't know. GTA4 still hasn't been released in my region.

If a PC release is made of GTA5, I can only hope that this time the publisher actually lets me give them some money.

A business model that involves getting bought by Google or major handset manufacturer isn't such a bad idea.

Yeah, they picked the wrong time to setup a company like this on US soil.

Now there is a company, there is somewhere to send the national security letters and executives and employees to punish if they don't comply.

Any proprietary code and hosted services run by the company don't get the 'we are not Google' feature many CM users are after.

I tend to think the spiral you observe is caused because we like developing centralized systems (for all sorts of good reasons), but they always fail to cope when we start trying to scale them across the globe. International links, connectivity and the speed of light are a bitch. While improving over time, these problems always defeat the latest and greatest centralized system. All that money being pumped into CDNs and local mirrors, and streaming video is still unusable and the butt of jokes for large parts of the world.

Interesting that both links to support the opening "As physical book stores continue to struggle and disappear" statement are about Barnes & Nobel locations.

My recent understanding is that in the US is that the number of book stores are actually increasing. B&N managed themselves into the toilet, and are providing an opportunity for the smaller independent bookstores to come back.

low-grade Taiwanese device manufacturers and the Mozilla foundation don't have the ability to impersonate the Microsoft security update service. Why bother with cracking when the computer is automatically requesting its spyware every day?

And in many jurisdictions that would be a crime unless you are a licensed electrician.

You are assuming it is a more accurate record of mistakes. This history is being kept by private companies and government agencies. The rich and powerful are still able to cover up their mistakes. The rest not so much.

If I copy a file from your share to my share, there is no reason to download the file, decrypt it, encrypt it with my key, and reupload it. Instead, I just need to reencrypt the file's key with my own and upload that, pointing to the same big encrypted blob.

Here we go. Should really search first :-) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/cryptnum.htm has some details of Blind Signatures and Double-spending Identification.

Of course, for this you need a government to allow banks to issue secure yet untracable digital cash. I can't imagine it would survive the first round of 'funding terrorism' charges.