Coffee good for you? Well, going solely on Antioxidant levels, this study says yes. http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1857962005 I wonder how this applies to my infrequently consumed mix of 33% non-dairy creamer to 67% coffee (no sugar.) Toshiba says they’re going to release HD-DVD players by the end of the year. The downside is that they’ll be $1000, while the PS3 with a Blu-ray player will be under $500. There goes their much touted “it’ll be cheaper!

Today I did a quick check using the dropdown on the Nightstar Forums to see if the political forum there was inhabitable, or still dominated by loonies. Second post I look at shows me that it’s still very much the way I left it, or even worse.“So I’d give the opinion that the situation described in the latter part of the article takes place in some parallel universe where states rights principles and libertarian ideas actually work.

I’m pretty sure they’ll work out in the end. I’m pretty sure the big complaints from democrats about gas prices are just politically motivated as well. Unless they’re stupid, they should realize that the higher gas prices are going to do their job regarding SUVs for them. They should also realize that adjusted for inflation, gas prices are actually just adjusting back up to the level they were years ago, and that they’ve been kept artificially low all this time, and that this is the reason their much hated SUVs and other similar automobiles have even been economically feasible for all this time.

Here’s some rather lengthy political observations combined with a good dose of history. :) First, the history. In 1992, voters voted in an amendment to the state constitution for Colorado. It wasn’t really a tax cut, but it mimics the effects of one. It was a state budget cap. It said that the budgets of the governments within the state could not increase faster than 6% per year. Any taxes collected above this prior year*1.

Sony licenses Ageia technology. All I can say is: Yesssss!The question is whether they’re planning on putting the entire chip in, or just simulate it with SPEs. Hopefully they’ll do the chip, but this will make the hardware a little more expensive. (perhaps $20-30 extra cost with the proper economies of scale. Sony will probably fab the chip themselves if they do, since Ageia is fabless.)Edit: Popedung (holy crap) Sony is grabbing up technologies for development left, right, and center.

I’ve been reading more and more on the San Andreas thing. The more I read the sillier it gets to me. I’m also finding the complete and utter ignorance of how computers work in the general populace and in the political arena to be staggering. The most annoying part is how a game renowned for criminal activity, violence, drugs, etc is now being made adults only because it has a single hidden sex scene that you have to bypass several code locks to open.

I stumbled on a news story today. It claims that next year cable companies will have the technology to do 100 Megabit cable broadband.Excuse me while I fail to be enthusiastic.The current cable modems can already do 43 megabits per second. Really! The cable companies throttle the speed on each individual house down because that 43mbit it split between multiple houses in a single cable “neighbourhood”. Not only that, but upstream of the provider there’s another level of bandwidth splitting.

Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance: Finished, about 8 hours. Did both endings too. I don’t know why everyone rags on this game about the graphics, sound, and gameplay. The only thing I noticed wrong with it was the game was a tad on the easy side. Psychonauts: I polished this one off on a rental. I didn’t get all the stuff, but I didn’t really see the need to. Cute game, and certainly a good effort for a team that hasn’t put out very many modern games.

Part 3: France,It seems that this is becoming a trend for me to post little newsbits from around the world and ridicule them. I’m sure I could find similar things in parts of the US, but since I’m already here they wouldn’t really match with the theme.This isn’t really a law in France, but it is something that seems to have taken place there. It seems that corporations there are allowed to sue you for not using their service.

Reasons not to move to other countries. Part 2, Australia:By law, you have to be very, very careful if you have a computer that has any sort of public access on it whatsoever. If some user of that system unbeknownst to you attaches a domain name to your server that promotes piracy, even if it does not host any files yourself, you could get sued and shut down for it. More info here.