Posts by Gary B.

Ubisoft insists DRM 'a success'

Good job Ubi

Corporate greed is the progenitor of DRM, not the pirates themselves. I can't say I never pirated a piece of software or movie, but I can say that if I found it useful or worth keeping, I went out and bought the thing. Amazingly, I do the same thing if the company releases a legitimate demo (with reasonable restrictions). Has Ubi ever thought that if they released demo versions of their games, they would likely reduce pirating just as much?

I'll bet that a good number of gamers that pirate do so just because they want to try out the game and see if it's worth forking over $40, $50, $70 for. But then, since they already have the game, why bother paying at all?

There are MANY ways to reduce pirating, but treating your PAYING customers as the CRIMINALS, while the PIRATES are REWARDED by having the buggy, Stalin-esque features removed from the same game is NOT the way to reduce pirating.

By the way, it's not just broadband speed where this fails, but the only useful broadband available at my house is DSL, and it sometimes disconnects on incoming or outgoing calls. Most of the time, it reconnects within seconds, but sometimes it's taken a minute or two to reconnect. Long enough for, from what I understand, this always-on DRM to assume you have no connection and just kick you out of the game, potentially without saving...

End of an era: Atlantis hits the tarmac

No

1) You do realize that NASA's budget is just a very small drop in a very large bucket, right? If you shifted, say, 100% of NASA's budget to healthcare (for instance), the healthcare budget would hardly even notice there was money added to it. There's no reason we can't have space travel AND healthcare.

2) An "international effort" like the ISS, eh? The U.S. ended up contributing much more than its own fair share of financing and construction efforts. Of course, we've now just thrown away the only vehicle we had of getting ourselves to a space station largely constructed through US effort (not to belittle the efforts of the other countries that contributed).

ISS and Atlantis crews face 'daunting' box-shifting job

@wiggers

"if you want to catch the last Shuttle home"

Well done, sir!

LightSquared admits it will knock out 200,000 sat-navs

So let me get this straight...

". But the company reckons its revised plan, announced last week, avoids interfering in all but the most-sensitive GPS kit: which LightSquared pegs at 200,000 devices around the USA. Those are important devices, installed in aircraft to help facilitate instrument landings and in mining operations to guide the drill bit"

So, they're "only" going to be interfering with the GPS units that have the potential to kill the most people at once. And unlike in a car, GPS landings are performed in bad weather when you *can't see the ground*...

Back to gaslight, coal and steam power - it's the future

Carbon-free energy, with a free pony too

So that would be nuke (of which hardly anyone wants to build any more of, post-Fukushima), or unreliable (in the sense of getting power exactly when you need it) wind or solar energy.