More and more developers seem to be using the existing engines (i know you used Unreal 3 for Rev 60, Unity, UbiArt, etc) which makes sense given the huge number of features they provide with little initial development cost and common tool sets/plugins used by other developers. Do you think there is much future in developers using custom engines for games (both indie and non-AAA) or do you think it will continue to become more uncommon for common genre games as you start at a larger and larger feature 'deficit' by having to redevelop the features on your custom engine, let alone porting issues, leaving only vert large/profitable houses (Naughty Dog, Insomniac, EA, etc) to be able to bear the time/$ costs?

You are absolutely right about this. I myself was home schooled and had/have troubles with trusting people to much just because they are in a position of authority or because they seem like they know what they are talking about. Any parent of a home schooled kid must teach the child to be a bit wary of people, because they don't all have your best interests in mind.

That said however I would not have traded my home schooling for anything. On the way in to work today I listened to my MP3 CD with song ranging from hard rock, to rap, to three songs from My Little Pony FIM. I am who I am today because the outlining parts of my personality were not ground down by a life of conforming to other kids expectations. In home school I was allowed to be the person I am not who I "should" be.

I also have a BS in Psychology with a minor in history. My 4 sisters and brother were also home schooled (and no we were not religious nuts) and have all turned out fairly well and are reasonably successful.

Think of all the possibilities this opens up in terms of remote support. We can already control someone mouse and keyboard but now we can do remote hardware changes, machine building, we might even be able to punch someone in the face remotely when they post something stupid. Other ides: Twitch plays this guy, remote skilled labor (woodworking, hair styling, artwork, etc...). Find a bomb that needs defusing? Download the bomb squid app and have the worlds best bomb defuses help you not have a bad day. The possibility here are endless, and a bit scary in some cases (hay look, I just defined the internet!)

Next time I murder a dude I am total using this as my defense. "But your honor its science, you can't argue with science otherwise you would have to toss all the blood evidence" Yeah, they don't let me talk in court anymore...

No one is being killed by the 5v on the USB bus. The problem is the counterfeit chargers are often poorly designed and can fail in a way that shorts the USB cable to the AC power.

There was an excellent teardown & analysis of a cheap charger last year that pointed out serious safety issues.

I'm not sure if I'm more impressed that your CDROM can shoot fireballs or that you somehow put 1.7TB of information on something, anything, that fits into your CDROM. :)

Has someone downloaded this and tried the password "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, A, B, select, start"?

Recently they added the ability to also buy the audiobook version and the app *syncs your place* so you can switch between the two formats. That's a pretty amazing idea.

But the app doesn't help the author. He said he had a Nook. Thanks to the recent firmware update people with a Nook Color or Nook HD can get then app, but if you have the eInk based "normal" Nook, you're just out of luck.

As DRM goes, Amazon has done an excellent job of reducing annoyance. They don't try that "you can only read this book on 2 devices, ever." stuff that we've seen elsewhere. But I get the feeling the only reason Amazon's DRM is so unobtrusive is they were so overwhelmingly powerful they could force publishers into a relatively consumer friendly system. We're lucky Amazon cares more about selling books than trying to wring money out of Kindle hardware sales, or the DRM would have been a lot worse.

The video says that the wind is manually entered by the operator. I find it odd that it shows the temperature and barometric pressure. Is that really useful information when you're lining up a shot?

After watching their little YouTube clip, I wonder how useful this is. Placing the aiming dot seems really similar to aiming in the first place, I guess the only difference is you don't have to compensate for gravity/etc. I found it conspicuous that they didn't show their simulated target moving in the video. Can this only help with a stationary target? It seems like it would screw up your aiming if half the time you had to do it manually (compensating for everything) and half the time the system handled it.

I'm not surprised. It can be bad enough when they actually know what they're doing, if they have no clue it can be terrible.

There is an amazing story on Reddit (in 23 short parts!) of an IT manager from hell destroying a workplace. It's frustrating just to read.

1451 is really pretty cool. It runs like a dog in Safari (0.5 FPS if lucky), but ran great for me in Chrome (probably closer to 20). It's very impressive.

I agree about the minecart. They did a fantastic job with that one as well.

The article is from Linux Weekly News (great resource, long time subscriber). It shouldn't be surprising that they would take a Linux bent on the story.