#1 - My GF's dad bonked our cat in the head. Honestly though, it was the cats fault for sitting directly behind him on the couch. He wasn't hurt though, just a little annoyed.

I'm guessing the lamp is too fragile to actually withstand flying objects, but it's amusing at any rate.

As an aside, the thought amuses me - How much of it is that Vlad works for MS and unwittingly finds fault in all things not MS, and how much is it that people know he works for MS and construe VC's statements about MS as being positive, and statements about Wii/PS3 as being negative?

But seriously, "haha, wiimotes break stuff" is stale. My own probably biased opinion is that either VC is hung up on Wii-hate, or is a bit out of the loop.

If they had thought of the ingenious idea of inverting a laser mouse for the control scheme, letting you slide your finger over it like a small mouse, this would have been a great idea. Unfortunately a cell phone company got there first and probably patent-mined the heck out of it.

As it is, the Zune seems about as terrible as a gaming platform as most cellphones. Cellphone games just suck. Control is everything.

The touch and tilt mechanisms of the iPhone promise to be interesting, but still somewhat non-standard. It has the potential for some great game design, whereas anything for Zune will be a hack around the interface.

If the game was terrible and didn't make a good point, then why not just let it do poorly in the awards? Nope, Slamdance made a statement, whether they meant it or were goaded into making it. The other participants have the same right to withdraw that Slamdance exercised in blocking it.

I applaud the ones that withdrew - they're automatic winners in my book.

Also, Sarge, I think there's a salient point in the difference between this action and some people's reaction to religious material.

The Ten Commandments in front of a courtroom is a big F.U. to anyone who doesn't believe that particular version of history. The presence of that symbol is encouragement and shelter for believers (for example, police, judges, and jury) to act out their prejudices against others.

People complaining about Walmart carrying a "Christian" game are exercising their own agenda. It happens a lot, it's kinda lame, it's not going away. It's probably not all that many people, they're just loud and insistent.

People complaining about religious artwork being paid for and representing certain government bodies are defending themselves and their fellow man from becoming second class citizens to prejudiced fanatics.

There is a difference in who these groups are petitioning, and the importance of each. Walmart only has some customers to lose. The government has an obligation to prevent itself from facilitating religious intollerance.

I'm in no way defending JT or even implying he's sane, but I think people are missing a large part of his argument (and why parental controls don't affect it).

Over-protective mothers are not worried about their own children playing GTA. They are worried about OTHER PEOPLES improperly cared for children playing GTA, getting ideas and 'training' and then shooting their own precious child.

Parental controls don't help here because the parents of the 'bad kids' don't care and won't use them. This is why Jacko feels it is necessary to make it illegal to sell games to kids, so that everyone else can feel safe knowing that they won't be killed by children corrupted by violent games.

The implication that kids wouldn't shoot people or knock each other up if it weren't for video games is there, but it's also not necessary for the argument. Even if a kid was going to shoot up a school, JT argues that the availability of GTA is training for how to do it effectively.

Overall, it's pretty weak. It's very unlikely that videogames could effectively make a kid significantly better at killing others. It also ignores more significant factors, such as things like the Columbine shooters being trained to hunt (deer, etc) by thier family.

I'm pretty sure JT realizes the implications of his arguments. I'm sure he knows where its weak points are and where it doesn't make sense. As nuts as he seems to be, he's not an idiot, and he knows his audience.

I bought my brother a very nice kodak digital camera a long time ago. I think it was one of their early digital models, it was a brick - large, square, and heavy. I don't even think it was 2 megapixels, but it took amazing pictures, very clear and colorful.

When it broke years later, I replaced it for my brother with the latest in that line of cameras. The new one was smaller, had a higher pixel count, better interface and LCD, and it took crap for pictures. He was pretty depressed by the drop in quality. Somewhere along the line it seems Kodak sacrificed their quality optics in order to keep up in the stupid numbers game - more megapixels for less money.

The commercial was funny, but I hope that their 'clever' color repair software is more than just compensation for poor quality components.

A friend of mine makes $40 an hour teaching business english to japanese students... by playing Settlers of Catan with them. :)

Sweetest gig evar.

So does anyone have wood for sheep?

After watching that (ow, my brain hurts), I'm actually convinced that someone came up with this 50 year old spatial reasoning test as a great thing to put in a *Sonic* game, but they decided that since the average american couldn't solve it if it was any harder than a kindergarten level they would just make it really easy and add a lot of load screens to inflate the estimated gameplay time.

I'm gonna go cry and trepan myself with a spoon now.

Yay! I finally found some reasonable data!

http://www.allcountries.org/uscensus/32_number_and_population_of_metropolitan_areas.html

My problem with Matt's data is that not everyone can live in the city proper. Atlanta is an extreme example (very sprawled, and can't annex surrounding area), but it has a population of under 500,000 but 5,000,000 people live so close that they go to a mall in Atlanta to go shopping. (i.e. shipments of PS3s to there would have 10 times the audience that the straight population data suggests)

In fact the definition of 'metropolitan' is based on distance that allows a less than 1 day trip to the city.

So what that link up there says is that between 70% and 64% of US citizens can go shopping in a city of over 1 million people. (Also it's a bit old - 1998- so the percentage has probably gone up I'd guess)

(to help interpret the different percentages (difference is CSMA vs PSMA), go here: http://www.answers.com/topic/primary-metropolitan-statistical-area-pmsa )

Mr. Khan, at least be realistic. The accelerometers, not gyroscopes, are off the shelf parts and have been around for years. Digikey has over 10,000 ADXL330's in stock right now, and they're a small orders dealer. Even the IR camera is probably an easily available bulk item, digital camera tech is highly developed and a monochrome 1 megapixel sensor is a piece of cake.

The cpu and the gpu, however, are new designs that had to have special runs done specifically for the Wii.

The truth is that since Nintendo plays their cards close to their chest, there's no way of telling what the problem might be if there even is one.

The numbers for everyone are still kinda fuzzy. Right now I wouldn't bet on any outcome for the new year.

Cats injured? Well one of my cats was on the couch behind my GF's dad. He swung his arm back in bowling and clocked the poor thing in the head. Seemed ok, just a little skittish for a few minutes.