Geek News Roundup for 10/04/09 - The Everyone-Else-Is-At-VGXPO Edition

There seems to be a lot to regret this week.  Take me, for example.  I regret not having the time or money to go to the Tokyo Game Show, since they had on display (among other games), Okamiden, which is one of the games I've been looking forward to after it was announced a month ago.  U2 regrets not getting their own video game yet, but I'm thankful for this because, just a decade and a half ago, back when U2 became popular, the best anyone could come up with was Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch: Make My Video.  If they'd hopped on the bandwagon back then, they'd have regretted it big time.  Miley Cyrus apparently regretted signing up for Twitter, because she recently deleted her account.  This is either the start of a stampede of celebrities abandoning the site or just a blip on the radar... I'd figure out which, but I don't really care.  I'm too busy stalking Darren Hayes to think about anyone else.

The Simpsons have never been 100% kid friendly, and their latest stunt proves it.  In a move that her neighbour, Ned Flanders probably wouldn't approve of, Marge Simpson will be shown posing nude on the cover of the November issue of Playboy magazine.  And not to be outdone, David Letterman took his pants off for the cover of Entertainment Weekly.  Sorry Dave, but I think the yellow-skinned MILF from Springfield wins.

Some say that it's far too soon, others say it's well deserved.  Whatever your opinion, the fact is that United States President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.  On the other end of the spectrum, Gideon Gono, governor of the Reserve Bank in Zimbabwe, was awarded this year's Ig Nobel prize in Mathematics. The award was given to poke fun at the runaway inflation plaguing the country.  For all of the issues that people have with Barack's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, you have to admit, he doesn't have to deal with the same problems Zimbabwe does.  And in other news, the Ig Nobel Peace prize went to a group of Swiss scientists who determined what every geek has been wondering for years: is it safer to be hit over the head by a full bottle of beer, or an empty bottle?

In other news, a recent firmware update to the PS3 caused many of the consoles to become crashy and unresponsive, and a follow-up firmware update to try to fix the problem has instead killed the BluRay drives of the affected PS3s.  It almost makes you think twice about running firmware updates, even if they're mandatory.

"Cloud" computing was dealt a blow this week, as users of T-Mobile's Sidekick device found out when an updated status report on the attempted recovery of data lost in a so-called "data disruption" was posted to the T-Mobile forums.  On October 1st, all users lost access to the service, and on the 10th, it was revealed that all personal data stored on the servers was most likely lost, and the only data left was whatever was still stored on their Sidekick devices.  Considering the servers were owned by a subsidiary of Microsoft, one wonders why they weren't smart enough to perform back-ups.  Surely they would've known better.  But in the long run, it's not as if Armageddon has arrived.  Speaking of Armageddon-looking new clouds...

And finally, scientists have just discovered rings around Saturn!  Er... I mean, more rings around Saturn!