Nothing to do with quality of PSN vs Xbox Live community. CCP has flat-out stated that they couldn't do it on Xbox because microsoft's networking policies wouldn't have allowed the game to work they way they needed it to to properly interact with EVE.

Today, the House voted to adopt the resolution (H. Res. 200) that will allow it to consider the actual resolution to overturn the regulation tomorrow. Note the words "Providing for consideration" in the title of the actual vote.

Granted, the House is still likely going to vote for the measure, but saying it's already passed is inaccurate.

Actually, the Second Doctor got hit hardest by the BBC throwing out episodes. (Algeria bought most of the first two seasons and didn't return its copies until after the junkings stopped.) That being said, 108 missing episodes is a bit of a hurdle to jump through... at least we have audio!

I generally agree with the article that starting with the 2005 series is the easiest way to get into Doctor Who. There are a few references to old stuff that you won't get, but they're subtle and not important to understanding what's going on.

If you want to start with the classic series, the more accessible places to start are either with Season 7's Spearhead from Space (the Third Doctor) or Season 12's Robot (the Fourth Doctor). Many episodes in the first six seasons were thrown out by the BBC, so they can only now be watched through audios and slide-show like reconstructions which can a bit challenging to watch. There are some restoration issues with the Third Doctor's stories, but at least all of the episodes are there.

Note that not all of classic Who has been released on DVD, so some of it may be a bit hard to find (at least legally).

That's a concurrent resolution, so it wouldn't be binding law even if it passed. Only bills and joint resolutions (when passed) have the force of law.

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.

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!