Or photograph/scan them. It's not like being in physical form prevents instant digitisation, especially with how good OCR tech is now.

In what situation would pressing the "off" button on a GPS transmitter that is currently on fire achieve anything? I think in general, a GPS transmitter will do a pretty job of turning off all by itself when its components are on fire. The likelihood of an electrical signal to an electrical device that is currently on fire doing anything at all is very slim, including when that signal is "turn off".

There are already plenty of components on an aircraft that cannot be turned off by the pilot while in flight. The black box being the blindingly obvious example. They have transmitters that the pilot cannot turn off too, which is where the information in the article comes from. I have read that Malaysian airlines weren't using the transmitter to transmit more detailed information simply because they had not paid the subscription to use this advanced tracking. It seems like it would be helpful if such tracking systems automatically monitored the location of aircraft even if they don't do advanced performance monitoring purely to assist with emergency search and rescue.

It's harder because putting satellites into space is harder than building cell towers but since both these things have already been done I'm not sure you're making a terribly relevant distinction. Modern aircraft have tracking systems that use satellite networks, the only real question is why is the pilot apparently able to disable it?

I'm not sure you need to guarantee it resists all possible sabotage efforts. It just needs to not have an "off" button in the cockpit and be located in an inaccessible area of the aircraft. I assume the answer to this question is simply that the planes involved are probably fairly old, and that new planes do indeed have features like this. If I can buy a car with that sort of feature for anti-theft I'm sure putting it on a plane can't be terribly difficult.

It'll be nice to use server 2013 without having to battle with a "touch screen optimised" interface. I guess they over estimated how many people are running server 2013 on tablets.

http://it.slashdot.org/story/1... May be related to something like this.

Presumably it's not a way of generating power, but rather storing it. Who knows how efficient the generation of this plasma is, but you probably need to burn far more energy to create it than is produced when it is used.

What sort of world would we be living in if you couldn't make a big fat profit out of suicide prevention? Certainly not a world I'd want to live in...

Oh, don't get distracted by just this one piece of news when there's been so much more revealed!

Max 4 person multiplayer! Region locking for co-op games! No offline single player! No mod support what so ever!

Sure, this RMT auction house is the shitty icing on the shit cake, but lets not lose sight of the complete mess this game is going to be even without this feature.

Source: http://www.destructoid.com/preview-diablo-iii-beta-207543.phtml

I'm pretty sure nobody walks into a retailer looking to buy a game, finds that it's not stocked then just completely gives up. No, you simply walk into a different retailer and look for it there. And if you can't find it anywhere, you think "well, that was a massive waste of time, I should have just bought it online". Like on Steam for example.