FLUUUUUUUUSSSSSSH!

To me it seems like they are trying to double dip. If I buy a game, go online and play it for a few months, and then sell it to omeone else and they go onnlie to play, there is no difference in the server cost beyond adding that [lyers tats to the game. I'm simply giving up my reserved slot to someone else.

It's like the Other OS fiasco again. Whe they came out with the PSN, it was free. You have the game, you go online, no fees, you just enjoy it. Now they're saying "Oh actually, now you have to make sure it's a new gamely purchased game or you're out of luck." If they were so worried about the cost of maintaining servers and the like then they should have factored tht in to the cost of the console or the should have made the service into something like Xbox Live. As for the markeing speak, how is decreasing the number of players available forplay enhaning the experience?

I've had just as much fun with Donkey Kong Returns as I had with the SNES series. Great game. Same goes for Mega Man 9 on the Wii Store. Bionic Commando Rearmed was good fun as well. It is possible to make games like they used to. You just have to look at the plethora of indie titles that are available on the Wii Store, XBLA, etc. Super Meat Boy anyone? That's Nintendo hard.

Now I need to go and get some paper towel, because the sarcasm is dripping down my monitor and all over my desk!

And you've explained exactly how it's at least a better analogue, if not a good one. Facebook isn't likely to disappear any time soon, so backing up my pictures likely won't even matter, but if it does, I'll be glad I did back up my pictures. (Though, actually, I couldn't care less about mine, so I don't back mine up, but that's not the point.)

That's a terrible analogue, more akin to swapping out your power supply. For a better analogy, it's more like getting your fluids checked regularly: everyone born in the modern age *should* know to do this, but somehow some people manage to miss this lesson.

It'll be Microsoft's less effective version of AdBlock Plus and NoScript?

Everybody keeps using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.

Their terminology is obviously off, but their intention is clear. During the election the private key is split into chunks that are distributed among different people and they delete (securely, I hope) the pieced together version. Thus, in order to use said private key you (theoretically) either need to make a mathematical breakthrough or get all of those guys to give up their piece. After the election, these guys get together and put the private key back together. Assuming they don't screw up the implementation or leave other glaring holes elsewhere, this is an entirely reasonable scheme.

Your naïveté is cute if you actually think your average voter has done legitimate research. I will grant you that low turnout means only people who care (either about a position or about voting in general will show up, and most of them will have a strong opinion one way or another, but the level of research doesn't tend to be beyond party lines or media favourites.

Did I ever say that Watson was going to be a doctor? So much of modern diagnosis beyond the really common diagnoses is basically doing what Watson does that a doctor armed with a Watson derivative will be far stronger than either a human doctor or Watson alone. He doesn't need to deduce, infer, learn, plan, or resolve; the doctor can do that using the information that Watson can provide, and Watson can provide that information much faster than a human trying to do a lookup, and, since he doesn't need to stop looking as soon as he finds something that kinda fits. We're still many years off from replacing doctors, but Watson will make for an /impressive/ supplement.

Okay, perhaps we are lacking some mutual clarity in what we consider a direct romanisation. If you simply want a mapping from Japanese onto roman characters, then Nippon-shiki will grant that. However, I consider this lacking because, if you follow its pronunciation you will be mispronouncing a lot of things in any dialect I've heard. This is how we run into the Nippon->Japan problem. Hepburn, which would probably be my romaji of choice if I wanted to present to an primarily-English-speaking audience, is actually a pretty good transliteration of pronunciation, but otherwise it's pretty much impossible, and it doesn't really do much of a mapping. This is the dichotomy that I call problematic to declaring a "direct translation": you can have good mapping or good transliteration, but not both. In this manner, there is no direct mapping, but we have agreed on a handful of romaji, chiefly Nippon-shiki and Hepburn, and called them "good enough". But even note here we come up with multiple ways to write the same thing. Now, Arabic script has its romanisations, too, each with their own issues. We've agreed on more than a handful of these, however, and everybody seems to have chosen different ones, hence all of the different ways listed above of writing just one name.

You clearly don't understand what Watson's achieved. Clearly, we don't have much use for a Jeopardy-playing computer, but that was never the real point. The point is we have a system with reasonable natural language processing skills combined with it's lookup/association capabilities and its learning system. this can be repurposed in a number of actually useful applications, and they're starting with the medical field. Something like this could potentially revolutionise medical diagnosis, and that's just the _start_.

Going backwards in time is really easy. The most difficult part, something touched on by science fiction novels, was exceeding the speed of light.

Seriously, that problem is much more difficult than you are making it out to be. Also, the fill-in-the-blank style questions actually used to be a weak point of Watson's that has obviously now become a strong point. I don't remember where I read it, but apparently they chose the questions in the same manner they normally do, less the audio/video questions, so I wouldn't say they are geared toward Watson at all. In fact, I remember at least two categories where Watson didn't provide a single answer!

What controversy? The only person bitching about this "controversy" is you. Originally Watson didn't even have a trigger finger until the Jeopardy guys bitched and insisted it needed one. If they thought that OCR was necessary, they would have bitched about that, too. Otherwise, it's an entirely unnecessary expense in terms of hardware, software, and testing for a problem they're not even trying to solve and all it really does is open up an irrelevant point of failure. Consider this in more scientific terms: they're isolating variables.