As someone in the vast majority of the world that has settled on a 3rd party cross-platform messaging app, I can only assume this excites Americans with their weird hangups about chat bubble colours?

On a desktop/laptop I would trade 1G of space any day of the week to have whatever random input things I plug in just work...

The problem here is that mining these days requires custom ASICs made to compute the double SHA-256 used by Bitcoin as the proof of work, CPUs and GPUs just don't cut it. ghash.io is the pool attached to the larger manufacturer of them, and as its always more profitable to mine using your ASICs than sell them, you can't just buy a bunch for anywhere near the cost price and mine yourself.

Solving this will require someone to make and sell the mining hardware at near the cost price instead of using it themselves. They may lose a bit of profit but in the long run the network will be better off.

Apparently

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_Velocity_Log
 
So like an optical mouse for ships?

Pretty sure its an absolute Ghz record, not one relative to the chips nominal speed.

Here in the UK the TV I got 8 months ago happily plays mkvs off USB drives. I would assume its quite standard in set top boxes as well?

For games with a single player component that stops working when the internet/sony is down it sucks, but for MMOs the whole point of game you 'own' is to play on their service. Compare it not to a single player game but more someone who buys say a mobile phone without a service. yes you own a nice shiny toy, but its pointless without the service that goes with it.

It's not the iPad you need to fool, but rather the server serving up the content. Which you could do, by connecting the two though the household, but it would probably be quite slow.

You can't do cross domain xhttprequests, so you can't do it via AJAX.

This, if you follow Ghostcrawlers posts on the WOW forums its clear that combat data from dungeons/raids is saved and mined for tuning/balance purposes. Especially the really hard stuff that not many groups attempt. Client side damage meters get pretty much the same data from the combat log sent to the game.

You can use a generic flash video player and feed it the same H264 video you asked HTML5 to play. If you want it to work in older flash versions that only support .flv video then you will need another encode.

Very few of the unlockable/craftable/buyable items are universally considered a direct upgrade on what they replace, and of those that are almost all of them are unlockable by achievements (wangler, equaliser, axtinguisher, etc). The achievement milestones are easy to get, and the achievements required are designed to make sure you know how to play the game (While there are some uberskill and grind ones in there, you don't need those to unlock items).

The only item I have seen consistently equipped that's not achievement based is the Sniper's Tribalman's Shiv. It's not a huge upgrade but you will need a couple of random drops to craft it.

I like the self-checkouts and find them quicker, but there are a few rules

1) Nothing age limited or in a security case that requires staff interaction anyway, just queue for the human when buying booze.

2) Unpackaged fruit or anything you have to weigh is a bit hit and miss.

3) Please please please understand the simple concept of showing the scanner the barcode, reverently placing the item in the dead centre of the scanner/scales platform thing and saying a prayer will not make it scan. I have seen far too may people fail to understand this, despite presumably having spent their entire lives watching the human operators do it. Ditto when its moaning at you to put the item in the bagging area, leaving it in your buggy/handbag/in another bag on the floor won't work.