Halfway decent might be a stretch for T3. Out of the entire thing, the only action scene worth watching was the amazing truck-through-building scene (and good on Arnie for funding that himself). Nick Stahl and Claire Danes both struggled to draw anything out of their characters besides "terrified" and "morose." In stark contrast to Arnie's relentless killing machine and Robert Patrick's secret stabbing machine of death, Kristanna Loken's secret weapon was apparently inflatable breasts. Thanks, writers! That's a surefire way to instill terror and respect in your audience.
The story lacked any of the humanizing elements of the first two films, and didn't utilize any of that universe in a particularly creative way (Like the T101 vs T1000 brawls). Taken outside of the Terminator universe, it makes even less sense, alternating between "eh" quality action sequences to drippy and sometimes painful dialog. It was an action film without much action, and an atmospheric film without any tension.
Personally, I'm glad to hear that the Terminator Franchise is getting auctioned off. I doubt Cameron has the time or inclination to buy it back, but I do hope it goes into better hands. That's a rich universe, just waiting for a skilled storyteller. Jonathan Mostow was clearly not that person. Neither was McG. Hopefully the next person to direct the series won't be some cut-rate music video developer, and instead will go to someone that understands that all films are drawn together by the human element, not in spite of it.
The DS hasn't really sustained even Nintendo 64 levels of 3d power. Of IGN's top 25 DS games, only about 1/3rd are in 3D. I'd guess that most people view the DS as the gaming equivalent of a Flash Player.
Which is why it's interesting that it has a commanding lead over the much more capable PSP. I guess technical capabilities don't necessarily lead to better game experiences.
People saying that this footage disgusts them is not only legitimate, it's healthy and (IMHO) reassuring
People saying that this footage disgusts them scares the heck out of me. Why? Because when the public sees game after game after game of killing thousands of "the bad guys" it's all fine an dandy. But show someone killing "the good guys," and suddenly it's a complete moral outrage. Wanton killing is fine, apparently, if it's against the proper people.
Guess what? About a quarter of my family was "the bad guys" in Hiroshima, and another chunk was "the bad guys" whom we threw into prison camps here in the US. This is the mentality that we sent Blackwater troops into Iraq with, who then turn around and start killing the people that they perceive to be the bad guys. It's a question of "who do we care about killing?" Up until now I had thought this culture had just become desensitized to violence in general. Apparently, we just think it's OK to kill people we don't like.
It just reminds me a little too much of this comic for my comfort.
Posting the source code to the wider community for review would definitely help with 1. and 2. by increasing the amount of reported bugs and helping the developers to patch them. Hardware failures are a bit more difficult to face down, but hardware is pretty good these days.
You can get all 3 if you want, but the cost would be outrageous. Districts who are struggling to find funding for their schools simply wouldn't be able to pay for all of that. You're essentially asking for the equivalent of 99.999% uptime with fiscal penalties for falling below that, and it just isn't cheap.
I had a friend who worked on the server software for those emergency button things that old people wear. They estimated that for every 5 minutes of downtime, someone died. A single server upgrade could involve a year or more of production and testing. That didn't come cheaply, and everyone knew the human cost that a single bug could precipitate.
Now flash forward to cities that have to decide between breaking union contracts with their street repair people or selling off all of their libraries, and you can see why voting systems are not at the top of the priority queue. In that view, there are easier ways to rig an election than through software, and that money would be better spent elsewhere.
More work needs to be done; in particular, the government should simply mandate that no proprietary software may be used in any voting machine that is actually used in an election.
Why not? The security of open source comes not from being on the creative commons, but from being seen and commented upon by hundreds of eyes. If Sequoia publishes their source code, and it gets properly vetted by hungry young researchers eager for their first big bug, why would that be any less secure than if the implementation were technically open-source? It should only be about 200 lines anyway.
I'd personally rather use an open-source voting system myself, but quite frankly the important fight is for security first.
As a side note, good on Sequoia for doing this. Even if you believe that this is just a cynical ploy to stall critics of the company, it still changes the discussion from "Is closed source the most secure software model out there" to "how open can you be with proprietary software so that you can get the security benefits?" This is good for us all. Hopefully this will be a success for Sequoia and the voting public in general, and we'll get more legitimate election results in the end.
'PST' stands for 'Personal Serial Trauma.' It is a highly advanced self-modifying file, which even after 2 years of continual use will keep up to 90% of your bits accurate. It's such a solid format, that Microsoft even ships tools with it to repair the file in the unlikely event that's you'd want it working again.
(4) Outlook sales are pretty much tied to Office sales, and Office sales are driven by more important factors. (5) It's possible to import / export from Outlook currently anyway, so this could be a bone to get regulators off their backs. (6) 3rd parties using PST format files might drive Exchange Server sales, which would be much more lucrative. (7) Maybe there are just a few cool people working at Microsoft. It is a huge company you know. (8) There are engineers at Microsoft who'd rather use Thunderbird.
You will never be able to find a tax reduction you can attribute to the government collecting this. That's not how it works, it just means the government is taking more. That doesn't mean I think the government should tolerate tax evasion. It will make MS a little less profitable/competitive, because they either have to absorb the higher tax from their profits or raise their prices/sales.
Seeing as how most government organizations are operating in the red due to the cashpocalypse, the "tax reduction" from collecting this would come in the form of fewer emergency bond measures that we will be saddled with paying back ten years down the road.
The problem is that disk space is NOT cheap at all, or plentiful. ARM-based Linux is used on a lot of embedded devices where there's only 16 or 32MB of flash space, total. This "fatELF" idea makes no sense, because adding in x86, x86_64, MIPS, Alpha, and SPARC binaries to your ARM binary will make everything take so much space that much more (expensive) flash memory would be needed.
I'm guessing that if you're running on an embedded device with 16 or 32MB of flash, you're probably never going to run Firefox, Open Office, Gimp, or any of a number of tools which could benefit from "run anywhere" binaries.
Personally, I'd love to re-write how applications interact with operating systems, and a specification for platform agnostic fat applications would go a long way towards that. Of course, I'd like to gut most of how applications are handled in modern operating systems, but that's a discussion for another time.
The iPod was popular in no small part because Apple realized a 2.5" HDD based player wasn't worth the extra 40GB of storage if the darned thing didn't fit in your pocket. So they made the first Hard-drive based portable MP3 player that *actually fit in your pocket*. And people paid a premium for the expensive 1.5" drives, both in cost and in capacity. But they could actually carry the damned things, and still carry a lot of music with them. The distinctive earbuds and solid ad campaigns helped the cultural iconography. But if iPods didn't actually fill a need, they wouldn't have won out over Archos or other MP3 players of the time.
Apple *gets* usability. Compare the iPhone to the multi-million dollar junk that was flooding the market at the time that it launched. I remember trying a friend's latest Motorola smartphone that had built-in flip-out 2 MP camera with real integrated lens system. We both had to futz around with it for about 10 minutes until we found the "take a photo" option. Eventually we found it buried seven or eight menus deep under "User Options" of all things. It was a total pain.
The usability of a lot of Apple's consumer electronics is underappreciated simply because, when done right, it's just the way that things are supposed to work. If you're browsing the internet and get a call, of course a pop-up should come on-screen and ask if you want to answer it, then immediately switch to call mode. Every phone since the iPhone does this. Of course, my phone before the iPhone had the ringer go off, and forced you to navigate away from the internet to the main menu, where you could then enter phone mode and answer the call. Seriously, it's amazing just how mentally crippled the development of cellphones in the US was before the iPhone.
A lot of people in the US are willing to pay a premium for electronics that they don't want to throw through a window in frustration. I'm not sure why this is such a hard concept, but people would rather buy devices that don't piss them off.
Let's face it. The western consumer values one thing above all else; price. The cheaper the better.
DSL was cheaper than cable, but it became marginalized because the network was unreliable and slow. Dial-up is now a fifth of the cost of most high-speed internet connections in the US. But it's not even considered an option now for most people.
I agree with the sentiment, but don't forget that the western consumer is also lazy and impatient. Combined with cheap, these three things form the legs of the crippled turtle that is our modern telecommunications system.
I believe we need to change the "They don't make em' like they used to" mentality.
They cut corners and cheapened out on stuff in the past too. It's just, none of those survived. So sure we can disassemble radio transmitters made in the 40's, see the craftsmanship that went into each one, and sigh that our equipment isn't made nearly as well. But there were a heck of a lot of transmitters and things made in the 40's that simply didn't survive because they were cheap junk.
It's not helpful to go to the upper management and say "they don't make them like this anymore." That's not something which is actionable. What can change decisions is "Look at this thing which has been making money for this company for 70 years. Now look at the others which all died in the 60's. It is worth it to make 'em like this."
Again, why not just use a printer? Select your votes, all of them get tallied and a printout with machine readable and human readable output. Put that in a box. If there is a question about the final tally, you can A: verify that the initial digital count matches a barcode-scanned recount, B: verify that all or some of the barcode-scanned votes match the written out votes, C: count all of the human readable output manually.
The idea that we can't do industrial printers these days on the cheap and reliable is laughable, especially with the stupid costs of these voting machines.
A lot of people somehow forget this. Suppliers will charge the highest the market will bear, or they won't go into a market. *Their* costs don't figure into the highest the market will bear, only whether or not they'll go into a market at all.
Introducing more capital in the form of loans does open the market up to more people. But it also guarantees that the average cost will go up significantly and artificially. Sure, schools are non-profit. But they're also hungry for resources, which has a similar effect on the scales.
If you have an idea worth turning into a business, you'll probably need to raise 10 or 20 thousand minimum in initial seed money anyway. Your investors take the risk, and you avoid spending any of your own money. Build prototypes, get patents, and attempt to raise full funding with that seed money.
Note that you're also paying for convenience. You can buy anything with in-game earned currency, or you can just plop real cash down and buy things. Players that have more time than money can grind everything, and players who have more money than time can fund development of the game.
Also do note that this is a pretty common mechanic in Asian MMO's. When a player has only intermittent access to gaming cafes, you have to find ways of monetizing the gameplay which doesn't lock players into repeating payments. Pay-or-play-for-items is one such strategy.
And how was such a conjecture published without data or peer review?
Because it was published as conjecture? You know, the first step before developing or dismissing a theory?
It is an interesting brainstorm, especially when developing particles that are potentially capable of traveling in time. Quite frankly it's no more insane a conjecture than Heisenberg smearing in time. And we've *proven* that.
And yes, it's 99.99% likely to be wrong. But that 0.01% of the time that it isn't...
Also, generally speaking the alternative OS that you load onto the iPhone, Xbox, Wii, NDS, etc are all modified versions of the console's native software, or generally otherwise use some other copyrighted material (Linux boxes excluded). For example, a lot of the new DSi karts have to masquerade as a copyrighted, trademarked game to get past the system protection. The iPhone is just a modified version of the iPhone's native, copyrighted software.
But hacking your TI is a completely clean case. The OS is being replaced, it can't be used to play otherwise inaccessible pirated content, the "homebrew" community for TI calculators is huge and well documented. Essentially, it's a perfect case unpolluted by other copyright questions. The judge would just be setting a precedent: "Do you have the right to load a different OS on your hardware than the one it shipped with?" Period. It's actually a brilliant tactic, that can then be applied like a tool to other cases. I really hope this one doesn't get settled, and we get a hard-and-fast ruling on it.
Mostly they hire people who get degrees in game design that include very little in the way of computer science. This is actually a fairly difficult problem to solve.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're not in game development, or if you are it's at some hopelessly corporate part of the chain. I've actually only encountered 3 developers with game design degrees, none of whom were programmers. Further, all of the network engineers at Turbine and the other MMO studios that I've met have been very traditional, hardheaded computer geeks.
Perhaps if you stopped just across-the-board thinking that they're doing it wrong, and started wondering why the systems are setup the way they are right now, you'd learn something.
On paper, that's an interesting approach. As a simple breakdown, remember that if you have 10 people in a zone, there are 10x10 potential interactions, or 100 things to check every frame. With 100 people, there are 10,000 things to check every frame. Even if you managed to throw 10x the processors at 10x the people, you've still got 100x more things to check. Remember, zones don't only define processor areas, but also allow the processors that ARE running to ignore things which are going on in other parts of the world.
Of course, before you hit that problem you'd hit two major ones of figuring out how to properly parallelize what is a highly-dependent model, and getting enough interprocessor communication between the units that everyone could keep up.
I wouldn't be surprised if Murdoch's beef with Google is not that Google makes the money, but that Google retains the audience. People go to news aggy sites, rather than entering into a News Corp empire portal, going to a News Corp source, and ultimately staying within the News Corp family throughout their visit. The latter is far more valuable than sharing ad revenue for a single article impression.
Slashdot Mirror
Aliens vs Muppets
The Maltese Chestburster
The Tuskegee Aliens (sure to be an Oscar contender!)
Perfect Strangers 2: The Queen and The King of Queens
$10,000 and 10 gross points could be much more profitable than a 60 million dollar bid if the series were in good hands.
Halfway decent might be a stretch for T3. Out of the entire thing, the only action scene worth watching was the amazing truck-through-building scene (and good on Arnie for funding that himself). Nick Stahl and Claire Danes both struggled to draw anything out of their characters besides "terrified" and "morose." In stark contrast to Arnie's relentless killing machine and Robert Patrick's secret stabbing machine of death, Kristanna Loken's secret weapon was apparently inflatable breasts. Thanks, writers! That's a surefire way to instill terror and respect in your audience.
The story lacked any of the humanizing elements of the first two films, and didn't utilize any of that universe in a particularly creative way (Like the T101 vs T1000 brawls). Taken outside of the Terminator universe, it makes even less sense, alternating between "eh" quality action sequences to drippy and sometimes painful dialog. It was an action film without much action, and an atmospheric film without any tension.
Personally, I'm glad to hear that the Terminator Franchise is getting auctioned off. I doubt Cameron has the time or inclination to buy it back, but I do hope it goes into better hands. That's a rich universe, just waiting for a skilled storyteller. Jonathan Mostow was clearly not that person. Neither was McG. Hopefully the next person to direct the series won't be some cut-rate music video developer, and instead will go to someone that understands that all films are drawn together by the human element, not in spite of it.
The DS hasn't really sustained even Nintendo 64 levels of 3d power. Of IGN's top 25 DS games, only about 1/3rd are in 3D. I'd guess that most people view the DS as the gaming equivalent of a Flash Player.
Which is why it's interesting that it has a commanding lead over the much more capable PSP. I guess technical capabilities don't necessarily lead to better game experiences.
People saying that this footage disgusts them is not only legitimate, it's healthy and (IMHO) reassuring
People saying that this footage disgusts them scares the heck out of me. Why? Because when the public sees game after game after game of killing thousands of "the bad guys" it's all fine an dandy. But show someone killing "the good guys," and suddenly it's a complete moral outrage. Wanton killing is fine, apparently, if it's against the proper people.
Guess what? About a quarter of my family was "the bad guys" in Hiroshima, and another chunk was "the bad guys" whom we threw into prison camps here in the US. This is the mentality that we sent Blackwater troops into Iraq with, who then turn around and start killing the people that they perceive to be the bad guys. It's a question of "who do we care about killing?" Up until now I had thought this culture had just become desensitized to violence in general. Apparently, we just think it's OK to kill people we don't like.
It just reminds me a little too much of this comic for my comfort.
Posting the source code to the wider community for review would definitely help with 1. and 2. by increasing the amount of reported bugs and helping the developers to patch them. Hardware failures are a bit more difficult to face down, but hardware is pretty good these days.
You can get all 3 if you want, but the cost would be outrageous. Districts who are struggling to find funding for their schools simply wouldn't be able to pay for all of that. You're essentially asking for the equivalent of 99.999% uptime with fiscal penalties for falling below that, and it just isn't cheap.
I had a friend who worked on the server software for those emergency button things that old people wear. They estimated that for every 5 minutes of downtime, someone died. A single server upgrade could involve a year or more of production and testing. That didn't come cheaply, and everyone knew the human cost that a single bug could precipitate.
Now flash forward to cities that have to decide between breaking union contracts with their street repair people or selling off all of their libraries, and you can see why voting systems are not at the top of the priority queue. In that view, there are easier ways to rig an election than through software, and that money would be better spent elsewhere.
More work needs to be done; in particular, the government should simply mandate that no proprietary software may be used in any voting machine that is actually used in an election.
Why not? The security of open source comes not from being on the creative commons, but from being seen and commented upon by hundreds of eyes. If Sequoia publishes their source code, and it gets properly vetted by hungry young researchers eager for their first big bug, why would that be any less secure than if the implementation were technically open-source? It should only be about 200 lines anyway.
I'd personally rather use an open-source voting system myself, but quite frankly the important fight is for security first.
As a side note, good on Sequoia for doing this. Even if you believe that this is just a cynical ploy to stall critics of the company, it still changes the discussion from "Is closed source the most secure software model out there" to "how open can you be with proprietary software so that you can get the security benefits?" This is good for us all. Hopefully this will be a success for Sequoia and the voting public in general, and we'll get more legitimate election results in the end.
What's the median? Average always gets screwed up by a few high end folk.
One person making a million and nine making zero means the average person's salary is 100k.
I'd been wondering what the difference was between this and the LCD or other projector displays (like myvu) currently on the market.
As far as I can tell... not a whole lot.
'PST' stands for 'Personal Serial Trauma.' It is a highly advanced self-modifying file, which even after 2 years of continual use will keep up to 90% of your bits accurate. It's such a solid format, that Microsoft even ships tools with it to repair the file in the unlikely event that's you'd want it working again.
(4) Outlook sales are pretty much tied to Office sales, and Office sales are driven by more important factors.
(5) It's possible to import / export from Outlook currently anyway, so this could be a bone to get regulators off their backs.
(6) 3rd parties using PST format files might drive Exchange Server sales, which would be much more lucrative.
(7) Maybe there are just a few cool people working at Microsoft. It is a huge company you know.
(8) There are engineers at Microsoft who'd rather use Thunderbird.
You will never be able to find a tax reduction you can attribute to the government collecting this. That's not how it works, it just means the government is taking more. That doesn't mean I think the government should tolerate tax evasion. It will make MS a little less profitable/competitive, because they either have to absorb the higher tax from their profits or raise their prices/sales.
Seeing as how most government organizations are operating in the red due to the cashpocalypse, the "tax reduction" from collecting this would come in the form of fewer emergency bond measures that we will be saddled with paying back ten years down the road.
The problem is that disk space is NOT cheap at all, or plentiful. ARM-based Linux is used on a lot of embedded devices where there's only 16 or 32MB of flash space, total. This "fatELF" idea makes no sense, because adding in x86, x86_64, MIPS, Alpha, and SPARC binaries to your ARM binary will make everything take so much space that much more (expensive) flash memory would be needed.
I'm guessing that if you're running on an embedded device with 16 or 32MB of flash, you're probably never going to run Firefox, Open Office, Gimp, or any of a number of tools which could benefit from "run anywhere" binaries.
Personally, I'd love to re-write how applications interact with operating systems, and a specification for platform agnostic fat applications would go a long way towards that. Of course, I'd like to gut most of how applications are handled in modern operating systems, but that's a discussion for another time.
The iPod was popular in no small part because Apple realized a 2.5" HDD based player wasn't worth the extra 40GB of storage if the darned thing didn't fit in your pocket. So they made the first Hard-drive based portable MP3 player that *actually fit in your pocket*. And people paid a premium for the expensive 1.5" drives, both in cost and in capacity. But they could actually carry the damned things, and still carry a lot of music with them. The distinctive earbuds and solid ad campaigns helped the cultural iconography. But if iPods didn't actually fill a need, they wouldn't have won out over Archos or other MP3 players of the time.
Apple *gets* usability. Compare the iPhone to the multi-million dollar junk that was flooding the market at the time that it launched. I remember trying a friend's latest Motorola smartphone that had built-in flip-out 2 MP camera with real integrated lens system. We both had to futz around with it for about 10 minutes until we found the "take a photo" option. Eventually we found it buried seven or eight menus deep under "User Options" of all things. It was a total pain.
The usability of a lot of Apple's consumer electronics is underappreciated simply because, when done right, it's just the way that things are supposed to work. If you're browsing the internet and get a call, of course a pop-up should come on-screen and ask if you want to answer it, then immediately switch to call mode. Every phone since the iPhone does this. Of course, my phone before the iPhone had the ringer go off, and forced you to navigate away from the internet to the main menu, where you could then enter phone mode and answer the call. Seriously, it's amazing just how mentally crippled the development of cellphones in the US was before the iPhone.
A lot of people in the US are willing to pay a premium for electronics that they don't want to throw through a window in frustration. I'm not sure why this is such a hard concept, but people would rather buy devices that don't piss them off.
Let's face it. The western consumer values one thing above all else; price. The cheaper the better.
DSL was cheaper than cable, but it became marginalized because the network was unreliable and slow.
Dial-up is now a fifth of the cost of most high-speed internet connections in the US. But it's not even considered an option now for most people.
I agree with the sentiment, but don't forget that the western consumer is also lazy and impatient. Combined with cheap, these three things form the legs of the crippled turtle that is our modern telecommunications system.
I believe we need to change the "They don't make em' like they used to" mentality.
They cut corners and cheapened out on stuff in the past too. It's just, none of those survived. So sure we can disassemble radio transmitters made in the 40's, see the craftsmanship that went into each one, and sigh that our equipment isn't made nearly as well. But there were a heck of a lot of transmitters and things made in the 40's that simply didn't survive because they were cheap junk.
It's not helpful to go to the upper management and say "they don't make them like this anymore." That's not something which is actionable. What can change decisions is "Look at this thing which has been making money for this company for 70 years. Now look at the others which all died in the 60's. It is worth it to make 'em like this."
Again, why not just use a printer? Select your votes, all of them get tallied and a printout with machine readable and human readable output. Put that in a box. If there is a question about the final tally, you can A: verify that the initial digital count matches a barcode-scanned recount, B: verify that all or some of the barcode-scanned votes match the written out votes, C: count all of the human readable output manually.
The idea that we can't do industrial printers these days on the cheap and reliable is laughable, especially with the stupid costs of these voting machines.
A lot of people somehow forget this. Suppliers will charge the highest the market will bear, or they won't go into a market. *Their* costs don't figure into the highest the market will bear, only whether or not they'll go into a market at all.
Introducing more capital in the form of loans does open the market up to more people. But it also guarantees that the average cost will go up significantly and artificially. Sure, schools are non-profit. But they're also hungry for resources, which has a similar effect on the scales.
If you have an idea worth turning into a business, you'll probably need to raise 10 or 20 thousand minimum in initial seed money anyway. Your investors take the risk, and you avoid spending any of your own money. Build prototypes, get patents, and attempt to raise full funding with that seed money.
Note that you're also paying for convenience. You can buy anything with in-game earned currency, or you can just plop real cash down and buy things. Players that have more time than money can grind everything, and players who have more money than time can fund development of the game.
Also do note that this is a pretty common mechanic in Asian MMO's. When a player has only intermittent access to gaming cafes, you have to find ways of monetizing the gameplay which doesn't lock players into repeating payments. Pay-or-play-for-items is one such strategy.
And how was such a conjecture published without data or peer review?
Because it was published as conjecture? You know, the first step before developing or dismissing a theory?
It is an interesting brainstorm, especially when developing particles that are potentially capable of traveling in time. Quite frankly it's no more insane a conjecture than Heisenberg smearing in time. And we've *proven* that.
And yes, it's 99.99% likely to be wrong. But that 0.01% of the time that it isn't...
Also, generally speaking the alternative OS that you load onto the iPhone, Xbox, Wii, NDS, etc are all modified versions of the console's native software, or generally otherwise use some other copyrighted material (Linux boxes excluded). For example, a lot of the new DSi karts have to masquerade as a copyrighted, trademarked game to get past the system protection. The iPhone is just a modified version of the iPhone's native, copyrighted software.
But hacking your TI is a completely clean case. The OS is being replaced, it can't be used to play otherwise inaccessible pirated content, the "homebrew" community for TI calculators is huge and well documented. Essentially, it's a perfect case unpolluted by other copyright questions. The judge would just be setting a precedent: "Do you have the right to load a different OS on your hardware than the one it shipped with?" Period. It's actually a brilliant tactic, that can then be applied like a tool to other cases. I really hope this one doesn't get settled, and we get a hard-and-fast ruling on it.
Mostly they hire people who get degrees in game design that include very little in the way of computer science. This is actually a fairly difficult problem to solve.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're not in game development, or if you are it's at some hopelessly corporate part of the chain. I've actually only encountered 3 developers with game design degrees, none of whom were programmers. Further, all of the network engineers at Turbine and the other MMO studios that I've met have been very traditional, hardheaded computer geeks.
Perhaps if you stopped just across-the-board thinking that they're doing it wrong, and started wondering why the systems are setup the way they are right now, you'd learn something.
On paper, that's an interesting approach. As a simple breakdown, remember that if you have 10 people in a zone, there are 10x10 potential interactions, or 100 things to check every frame. With 100 people, there are 10,000 things to check every frame. Even if you managed to throw 10x the processors at 10x the people, you've still got 100x more things to check. Remember, zones don't only define processor areas, but also allow the processors that ARE running to ignore things which are going on in other parts of the world.
Of course, before you hit that problem you'd hit two major ones of figuring out how to properly parallelize what is a highly-dependent model, and getting enough interprocessor communication between the units that everyone could keep up.
I wouldn't be surprised if Murdoch's beef with Google is not that Google makes the money, but that Google retains the audience. People go to news aggy sites, rather than entering into a News Corp empire portal, going to a News Corp source, and ultimately staying within the News Corp family throughout their visit. The latter is far more valuable than sharing ad revenue for a single article impression.