If memory serves...

Ditching the telephone sanitisers resulted in the death of the rest of the species due to infection caught from dirty telephones.

"Xbox is useless without Gold"

Mine is pretty useful without it. Plays games and can download stuff and everything.

Not interested in playing against 13 yr old CoD fans in multiplayer so why would I want Gold?

Besides BBC iPlayer must be free to a license fee payer by law.

Ah, I wasn't accusing the Register of being sensationalist, that was aimed squarely at the Mirror and Daily Mail. In a brief article like this though the description of the work made it sound like absolute fluff, which is the conclusion some of the commenters above have obviously come to.

Sheffield has a horrible square ended cathedral in the city centre. Having played a lot of Fallout 3 on a pretty old PC, I imagined that someone must have set the draw distance quite low and that if I walked a bit closer the apparently missing spire would fade into view.

Not that I'm mad or anything.

...and the way El Reg described it made it sound like bad science, i.e. setting out to do a study using a tiny and biased sample. Whereas it was really a paper that says to other scientists "hey this is interesting, we're going to study it further".

The Mirror and Daily Fail clearly only cared about a sensationalist negative anti-gaming article, but then that's not anything new.

Not a binary classification

There's a whole spectrum of games between meat-headed COD and 'plan meticulously but still get shot by someone a mile away that you had no hope of seeing' Op Flashpoint. This is certainly closer to COD, but there is at least a semblance of tactics required, i.e. taking cover from time to time rather than running around like a maniac.

Some people like to cuddle afterwards.

...and how many professors actually wear their gowns to anything other than No.1 dress occasions?

Final point

"On top of which, sometimes it is just better to have 2 devices for doing 2 different things in 2 different places."

I agree with this. That's why I'd rather have a PC with separate monitor, or TV with separate DVD player and digi-box, rather than any kind of combo. If something fails, or you want to upgrade it (my HTC hero is going out the door as soon as my contract is up), you just swap out one of your gadgets instead of buying a whole new system.

Excellent!

Finally a way to deal with those beat-thumping hip-hop listening neighbours.

Not quite

Since SETI was essentially trying to find patterns in that static you see on an untuned TV, CERN have a slightly better chance I feel.

Perhaps

You then need to consider the possibility of getting it wrong. While your system is fallible, you can't allow capital punishment to continue.

Consequences

You'll find that those who support capital punishment would love to see the consequences you describe. Without actually considering what that would mean, or course.

Commenter yes

Well I come to expect that from our community, but I was actually referring to the article author.

If so

If so, that is possibly the most sensible thing the government has ever done. Balls to democracy. If the idiot turkeys decide to vote for Christmas, they need saving from themselves.

Cha-ching

The author can at least pay for their paper to be made open access... if they can find another 1000-odd dollars.

It's a good scam those journals have got going.

10.6

You need 10.6 if you want to upgrade to 10.7. Anything older lacks the necessary app store.

But!

"And the number one thing that PowerPoint is not, is a page layout tool. Seriously, stop doing that."

Use it all the time for scientific posters. Won an award for one them.

Poor scientists can't afford (the money and time to get good at) anything better and a crap poster is the fault of the designer anyway.

"the other 99.99% of processor time left on my PC?"

With Zynga games as badly written as they are, you're lucky if you have any processor time left at all.

Leader?

I thought this was just some guy who sort of belongs to the group, rather than anyone important.

I still suspect they're scuttling under the carpet to avoid the much bigger and more dangerous hacking group that's gunning for them.

I ATEN'T DEAD

I think you mean "I ATEN'T DEAD".

A witch doesn't need to worry about spelling. It's the word's fault for being wrong.

Nice jump in tech?

What about those jumping from a 3GS, which is coming to the end of its 24 month contract, to a nice shiny iPhone 5? Action of an iDiot, or someone enjoying a pretty significant jump up in technology?

Ignorance is a fine excuse

Did you try to enlighten him?

Worse than ignorance is not being ignorant but failing to help others rid themselves of their's.

1.25 out of 3

I was with you on the first paragraph. Then about a quarter of the second.

The rest is just stupid fluff.

"Does not our native language merit some care?" no, not really. Languages change. Get used to it.

I could very well ask why you refer to cow meat as beef. That's a Normanism. Our Saxon language needs protecting. To which the Britons in the back will cry 'hang on a minute!'*

*Actually I can't pronounce what they'd cry.

Got a point

It's not like the ones with a numpad costs any more.

D'oh

That makes (crazy studio) sense from a licensing point of view.

It'll stunt its growth though.

Ours is the pick up the bill generation

It seems ours is the pick up the bill generation. The baby boomers in the political and financier classes tell use to tighten our belts to pay for their excesses, and we're told we're not allowed to palm it off to future generations as they did. We're like a middle child.

Libya?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was us and France. America only really joined in because we asked them.

Normally I agree

...except in this case it would be interesting to see a movie of Dune that isn't quite so mad. The original was on over the weekend, and I think 'cult classic' must be a euphemism for 'didn't do well in cinemas because people on acid prefer to watch the popcorn machine'.