Want to know why the PC games market's dying? This might have something to do with it.

If you buy Spore or Mass Effect, they will "die" if they can't phone home every 10 days. That's right: you BOUGHT a copy of a game, you play it single-player, yet it expects to phone home to the company.

After the first activation, SecuROM requires that it re-check with the server within ten days (in case the CD Key has become public/warez'd and gets banned). Just so that the 10 day thing doesn't become abrupt, SecuROM tries its first re-check with 5 days remaining in the 10 day window. If it can't contact the server before the 10 days are up, nothing bad happens and the game still runs. After 10 days a re-check is required before the game can run.

I have some words for Bioware and EA, but unfortunately they all involve four letters.

[UPDATE]: EA have partially come to their senses - but only partially. It still has SecuROM crudware, it just won't phone home much.

Ted Key has passed on.

Bust out your DVDs of Rocky & Bullwinkle and look back on some improbable history in his honor.

A lot of mail servers are hit hard - in part because spammers are trying to use them to "backscatter" spam by sending to known nonexistent addresses.

We saw a major attack like this the past couple weeks, and it may get worse; the line of trying to watch for this, versus not sending NDR (nondelivery reports) back for a bad address, is tricky. After all, you don't want spam, but you also want to know if you mistyped an address or someone's moved.

Movie coming soon - VR Mag has a great article set on how the movie's effects were made.

The more I see of the upcoming Speed Racer movie, the more hopeful I am for it.

Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core.

There's a game in here - I just know it. It's in there somewhere.

Review will come later this week.

Yep, it works up there too.

Now, a moonbuggy in Alabama can go just fine without a fender, but in Taurus-Littrow a missing fender was a potential disaster. The reason is moondust. When a rover rolls across the lunar surface, it kicks up a plume of moondust in its wake. (Astronauts called them "rooster tails.") Without a fender, the rover would be showered by a spray of dark, abrasive grit. White spacesuits blackened by dust could turn into dangerous absorbers of the fierce lunar sun with astronauts overheating inside. Sharp-edged dust wiped off visors would scratch the glass, making helmets difficult to see out of. Moondust also had an uncanny way of working itself into hinges, latches and joints, rendering them useless.

They taped the fender back on, and later replaced it with a set of laminated maps duct-taped together. Small wonder every single manned space mission includes a spare roll of the stuff.

This is probably the best rebuttal to this type of sensationalist garbage I've seen yet.

Perhaps he's envisioning a scenario where a user spends five minutes googling, comes up with nothing, calls that a "good faith" search and forges ahead with an infringing use. That's not going to fly before the court; the user will have to detail how he conducted the search, and if the copyright owner can demonstrate that no, actually, it is quite easy to find the work's original owner, the "good faith" provision doesn't apply. And even if the "good faith" provision does apply, the Copyright Office recommends that the user should still have to compensate the owner for a reasonable amount.

It's all there in writing, folks. This isn't that hard.

In addition, the "orphan works" provision is important for another reason - how many pieces of software, how many other works are currently unattended and in danger of vanishing entirely?

The NY Times has an article on a new theory for the Titantic disaster - it wasn't bad steel plates, but bad rivets.

Ship's been sunk for quite a while, guys.

I thought the industry had learned how foolhardy this was back when 3dfx folded, but no, the silliness of multi-chip boards is making more of a comeback.

If the X3 were destined to be a retail product then Asus would doubtless work on a more elegant solution, but this conspicuous cooling system is a worthy reminder of the huge amount of power that's being wasted as heat for the sake of a few extra frames a second. And that's to say nothing of the power expended in dissipating that heat. Green computing it's not.

The X3 is an interesting demonstration of engineering potential, but its real value is as a demonstration of how fundamentally inefficient multi-GPU gaming is.

Hardware Secrets actually have a pretty nice all-encompassing TV tutorial if you're in the market for a new TV and need to decide on what tech to look for.