Those fun games were done and sold by Nintendo already. I'd like to see a functional tool that can become useful in a wide variety of yet unforeseen situations, but that would require an input lag and accuracy similar to the tried and tested 'old-style' controllers. And that's why the Sony and MS motion controllers are doomed to fail as expensive but clunky and uncomfortable prototype models.

Same for me. My native tongue isn't English, but I had to start learning it at the age of six because no one translated manuals/dialogue fast enough. It's strange what a small bit of motivation can achieve.

Then NOT INVISIBLE "HAI WORLD!" strikes me as the correct syntax.

Thinking back, I've never once made a sweet cake with added salt in it, and I suppose having graduated a cake-making school would have made me do some if it was a common technique. Perhaps the closest was a date cake, where the canned dates may or may not have had some sodium glutamate as an additive (banning sodium salt would be a funny mess). Sandwich cake is a different thing, but even that didn't need any more salt since all the ingredients were salty to begin with. On bread-making, salt is much more critical. I can see the article claiming salt "strengthens dough by tightening gluten," which has a misleading undertone. If you leave all salt out of a normal wheat bread dough, the gluten doesn't coagulate in any useful way. The result is a gooey, slimy mess. Not to mention that the yeast runs wild without the correct amount of salt, and the bread becomes very uneven in shape while it's leavened.

GIMP was dropped so they could make room for Comix and the non-free video codecs. Lucid Lynx will be shipped with the first 20 volumes of One Piece, and a torrent for the Love Hina DVD-rip.

I'd unhesitatingly recommend sonos. Its one of the few electronic products that I own that I am completely satisfied with. It should pass the wife test - the controller is very pleasant to use (though controlling it with the iphone is pretty nice as well), and its hassle free. You don't need to do anything on the computer at all to use it or even to set it up. They have 3 solutions for audio output - a bare module which outputs line-level audio and so requires an amplifier + speakers, a module with a built in amplifier (so just hook it up to speakers), and a system similar to an ipod dock which includes speakers. The whole house control is excellent, allowing you to arbitrarily link any units together for synchronized audio, or play differnet audio on any unit. There integration with internet streaming is excellent, and their rhapsody implementation is particularly good - songs streamed from rhapsody are usable in playlists as if they were on your local nas. You get a free rhapsody streaming demo account with it, and chance are after it expires, you're going to end up subscribing.

Darn, but you are so full of your self. My 20 year old system powering 5 sets of parallel speakers must not be working, maybe I am just hearing echos from days gone by. Seriously, it may not be the best idea, but it can and does work for me. You could also run the speakers in series/parallel (like 2 parallel pair of 2 series speakers) or use matching transformers from a master 70 v line output transformer or any number of other ways. Or you could just be a smart *** and nominate the poster for a Darwin award, much easier, and evidently more fulfilling than being constructive. Marlin

Paying writers more won't get you better writers. The problem they have is that they are a sick little intellectually inbred nepotistic community. Paying more to writers just gets you the same writers, only now they can afford TWO antique espresso machines at their house in Pacific Palisades instead of just one.

Or is it that non-commercial violations of copyrights aren't that upsetting, but commercial violations are?

I don't remember a great many people rushing to the defense of the guy trying to sell Beatle's music by violating copyrights, even though he was going against a big label.

"But IBM *did* actually reform."

Really, how so?

Considering the existence of laws such as the "The Artists' Rights and Theft Prevention Act of 2005", the "The Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999", and various others, it seems clear that the US Congress disagrees with you.

It's on my home computer as my primary OS, next to Windows XP for anything else that I am forced to use by third parties. It is indeed embarassing... If anything it could be just a lazy guy who did this...

I mean come on... Hackers 3 is a fictional movie. Microsoft didn't swap NT with Linux in Windows 7 or anything, or used Plasma for their desktop... _'

Similar story here. I remember tearing my hair with all the bugs when Hardy came out, but Karmic hasn't done anything like that.

Pattern matching and searching power will come in very handy for the task of creating a stronger Go-playing computer program. The "exploding" size of the search tree in Go is just too much for classical computer systems. If that tree could be trimmed with an intelligent pattern matching routine, solving Go could finally take less time than what the universe has existed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go

A simple search into the archived information about a "difficult individual" could produce endless ways to force silence. This is a problem for political opposition, whistleblowers, etc.

The existence of an information database like that is a foothold for corruption and abuse - It's a total waste of money if it's not used in any way. In how many ways can you use a database containing communication of private citizens?

The first thing that comes in mind is that you can discriminate someone with it.

Think of the Facebook problems as analogous. All that information about different individuals makes for an interesting communication tool, which then became a nightmare when a public institution used it for discriminative purposes. That means the school that just recently expelled students (or otherwise penalized them) because of information found on their Facebook pages.

A government database has a couple points to keep in mind: The secrecy and security hinted in the linked article would mean that without authorization by the NSA you couldn't get confirmation about what information was in the database concerning yourself. Of course, there would be no way to remove information from the database, either. A simple and attractive option for corruption would be to sell database queries to companies seeking personal details of their employees, all in the name of "driving the economy forward."