Geek News Roundup for 11/01/09 - Why Can't I Own A Canadian?

It used to be thought that health care reform in the United States would happen when pigs flew.  Well, this is the sound of one ham flapping.  The United States still has a long way to go before they have the level of health care that I have as a Canadian, but it's a start.  The bill itself is long, very long, and apparently getting longer (mentioned at about 4:12 into part 1 of the episode).  If the biggest complaint you have is that it's big, then that must mean that War and Peace, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Bible are the worst books ever.  Kinda kills your enthusiasm for NaNoWriMo, doesn't it, when an entire party can enter and already be over 1900 pages ahead of you?  I'm only at 13054 words for the month.  Stupid Democrats, showing off.

This week has been a week of milestones.  Sesame Street has celebrated its 40th anniversary, and at the same time, Wallace and Gromit has been around for 20 years.  In fact, if you go to the official Telltale Games web page, you can download a Wallace and Gromit PC game for free!  Hope you hurry, though, because the special offer ends very, very soon.  Within hours of this post, in fact.  Also, speaking of special days, November 5th was Flux Capacitor Day.

There is some good news for injured or crippled pets: they no longer have to fear for their future.  Just ask Andre the dog.  All it takes is one person (or team of people) to decide that something's possible, and something like this can happen.

Flash was never, in anyone's wildest imaginations, the best thing to happen to computers and the Internet.  And when Windows Vista came along, it really showed how awful such an idea was.  Well, welcome to the future.  If such an idea catches on, I hope one day that Flash will go to the same technological graveyard as the Geocities school of web design and the Zip disk.

COFEE has apparently leaked all over the Internet and despite one site's efforts to keep the mess from spreading, by now it's available for pretty much anyone to download.  What this means, of course, is that a piece of software that can break passwords and check your on-line activity has not only been given to regular users such as you and me, but it has also been in the hands of police for quite a while now.  I hope the police haven't abused the power of the software, because I'm sure the rest of the world certainly will.  But it's not like you have to be a rocket scientist to break passwords these days.  A lot of people don't bother changing the generic password they're given when they start using a service or a piece of software.  Take iPhone users, for instance.  If they jailbreak their iPhones, many of them make themselves vulnerable to attack.  iLaugh.

It's never too early to learn, as a baby's cry can tell you.  Apparently, you can cry in French and German, depending on where you were born.  I imagine this means you can cry in other languages as well.  (And no, I'm not kidding, despite the presence of this on the Internet.)  Myself, I remember recently hearing the cry of a young kid who couldn't get their way, and it sounded a lot like an ambulance.  I'm still not kidding.  But even after leaving the womb, a child doesn't stop learning.  Apparently, this is because of the presence of comic books in their lives.  I believe it.  I used to read Tintin and Asterix a lot and look at how I turned out.  But, and this is the important thing, you can't own me.  I'm sorry, but it's true.  And don't bother asking Google this, because I don't think they know either.  (Bonus material: read this.)

Sony finds itself in a lot of legal hot water, lately.  First of all, blind gamers want to enjoy games, too.  And although "visually impared" can mean a lot of things, it makes me think of all those people with no eyesight who can't enjoy games in the first place.  Unfortunately, visual media doesn't come in braille or large print editions, and this means that it's very hard for the visually impared to enjoy a game.  And increasing font size on the screen will do nothing more than overcrowd an already overcrowded menu system on most modern games.  I know I have a hard time seeing the font on some games, but that's because I'm stubborn: you can't really use a 20-year-old television to play a game like Final Fantasy Tactics without being directly in front, squinting at the horrible translation so that I can read it.

Second of all, Sony was finally sued over their firmware updates, and I have to say, it's about time.  An interesting thing to note is that one of the things they're being sued over is the fact that they require certain firmware updates to be present in order to play games you've purchased for your system.  It used to be that you could buy a game and it would run automatically, no extra stuff needed.  Not now.  For those of you who still haven't purchased a current system, here's how it works: when you purchase a PS3 or PSP game, if your system doesn't have the most up-to-date firmware, you might be prompted to update before you're allowed to play the game.  Also, you're not allowed to access certain functions of your system once the new firmware is available, which forces you to download and install it if you still want to use your system the way it was designed to be used.  It's possible, as has been demonstrated, that a system update will brick your machine.  It's worse when it's a required update and it feels like your console is being held hostage until you install it.

I'd better get back to my NaNovel before the day's completely done, but before I go, I wanted to mention that the Large Hadron Collider is still not going to destroy us.  This time, it's because a bird dropped some bread on it.