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I want Professor Layton to be my valentine.

Er, wait, I mean, I want that, but for a valentine...that'd probably be Samus, with all those modular arm parts so necessary to my satisfaction.

Yeah.

That sounds about right.

I totally agree about the camera, actually. It's great to have the auto-cam most of the time, but it definitely does make it difficult to feel immersed in the worlds; you just aren't allowed to see everything, making it feel like you're on "rails" occasionally. I first noticed this in Sweet Sweet Galaxy, when I was trying to see what the mushroom guy was saying right before getting the star -- I ended up having to run around the perimeter of the cake to get a look at him.

Anyway, just my two cents, but I agree with ShortFuse. If they had just made the camera always changeable, and perhaps have Mario actually turn to view things outside of his view when you go into first-person mode, it'd be perfect. Without it, it's still really fun and playable, of course...just a niggling issue.

Video camera get! :D

I must admit that the Logitech cam looks very tempting; I'd love to win it, or anything else in this list.

Hello; I read the site on a ridiculously frequent basis, but I don't think that makes me any more eligible...in any case, one of those webcams would be superb. Thanks!

No, this won't destroy binary. It's interesting how many people think that quantum computing introduces some kind of ternary number system; quantum computing doesn't introduce a third state for logic, or any such thing that's already been possible (base 10 computers were actually tried for a while and eventually discarded).

Basically, the big difference with quantum computing is that you can compute solutions with your system in an indeterminate state, allowing you to explore the entire solution space quickly. This makes previously so-called NP-hard problems much easier (if not trivial), because the known methods for solving them (mostly brute force) become feasible when huge swaths of the problem space can be computed concurrently and practically instantly.

This may be slightly inaccurate, as I'm only a CS major in training...

The strength of a quantum computer is not that each qubit can represent some additional tertiary state (believe it or not, this idea was tried and rejected long ago), but that each qubit is in an indeterminate state where it is both 1 *and* 0. This enables you to explore the entire solution space representable by the number of qubits you have almost instantly, and trounces the best abilities of classical computers on NP-complete problems (for which the solution set increases as some rapidly increasing function of the problem size without a clear way to partition the set). As a computer scientist (in training), I'm pretty shocked that something like this made it out 'under the radar', so to speak; it almost makes me doubt whether it's a true quantum computer, or just a different sort of classical computer.

For the EE freaks among us, this gives "bubble pushing" an entirely new meaning.

I've tried out DarwiinRemote, but haven't had a chance to give WiiSaber a crack. Looks pretty interesting; I'm especially impressed by how responsive it seems.

And, of course, here's the real reason for my post...

"There are certain phases that a processor has to go through to run information. x86(or Intel processors) require something like 21 different phases to do what power PC does in 7. So an 800mhz power PC is about the same as a 1.6ghz Intel."

I assume that you're talking about stages. In fact, having more stages can increase the throughput of a processor, because more instructions can be run in parallel (i.e. pipelined, if you're familiar with the lingo). Regardless, the PPC architecture does have an advantage over x86 in that it's RISC rather than CISC, and instructions have a uniform, fixed length, which makes it much easier to do pipelining.

I don't understand how any Wii owner could not be excited by this development -- I find it odd that you mention that this is boring and useless quite a few times in your post.

As far as the video goes, this'd be great for teaching elementary physics.