I use the Nostromo by Razer/Belkin and am loving it so far. It takes the WASD cluster and a few others like tab, shift, ctrl, caps-lock, and gives them to you in a nice neat package. You also have a D-Pad by your thumb which you could do all kinds of crap with (batarangs and bat-claw in combat for Arkham Asylum, skill usage in Monday Night combat, switching weapons in TF2), not to mention macros (flamethrower + axtinguisher in TF2 come to mind). It's like a keyboard without the keyboard.
Actually, Portal 2 is one of the good ones. Valve in general has been good to us. That "constant loading" you are talking about has been there since Half Life 2, unless your forgot (or never played any earlier Source Engine games, in which case I pity you.)
Doubtful. I already have a job pretty much secured (I hope) and have a consistent schedule. The company is small, and I have weekends pretty much to myself. If you ask me, it will get extremely better.
And I thought I was a conspiracy theorist. There are plenty of ways to get out of the garage, you just have to know where to look. For example, as much of a gold-rush as it is, how many have made "that one great app" for mobile phones and struck it rich? Use those funds to work with the system and then work to change it.
Blatant sarcasm aside, most of us have little time to do these sorts of things anymore. I myself can't seem to gather up the enthusiasm (or disposable income) to do anything. I would really like to break out that bin of scrap I saved from a few months back and make myself a robot minion. It would be a great challenge for my programming skills. But sadly, college classes and the regular college chaos prevent me from doing so. Maybe once I graduate.
I am simply stunned that nobody has mentioned body heat. Think about it, all you would need to do to charge your cell-phone is put it in your pocket! Spelunking? Attach a patch to your arm and your light lasts even if you (idiotically) run out of batteries. The applications for this tech are endless, and quite frankly, the article criminally neglects this fact.
kruhft writes: "I was recently doing some research into Genetic Programming and found through a blog post that looks to be useful. After looking over the code and license, I found that this was the first piece of code I had seen that was protected by a patent, issued on June 19, 1990. I read that patents last for 20 years, meaning that the patent that this code refers to is expired. Is there any way for me to be sure that using this code is safe from any patent troll attacks if I choose to use it? Would rewriting the code keep me from violating any other patents that the author might have regarding the use of such an algorithm? Does the code pass into the public domain after the patent expires?"