Nvidia has reminded us that they want to virtualize the graphics processor. The company wants to take it out of the computer on your lap or on your desk and put it into a server somewhere without you noticing the difference.

There are situations where this makes sense. Given the cost of buying and maintaining workstation hardware, Nvidia's argument for the VCA seems more or less convincing. But I'm slightly less optimistic about the prospect for the Grid gaming server, or any cloud gaming service, really—call it leftover skepticism from OnLive's meltdown earlier this year.

No matter how fast your Internet connection is or how near you are to the server room actually rendering your game, Grid just won't be 100 percent as smooth as local rendering all of the time.

“Urban Explorers (UE) — hobbyists who seek illicit access to transportation and industrial facilities in urban areas — frequently post photographs, video footage, and diagrams on line [sic] that could be used by terrorists to remotely identify and surveil potential targets,” warns the nation’s premiere all-source center for counterterrorism analysis.

Spelunking through subway tunnels might alert terrorists to “electrical, ventilation or signal control rooms.” The vantage point of a rooftop provides a glimpse useful to the “disruption of communication systems.”

EA and Maxis' claim that it would take "significant engineering work" to make a workable offline version of SimCity took another hit today. Hackers have released modding tools that disable the game's periodic server checks without breaking the simulation. The tools also unlock other features not in the final game.

It's been rather incredible watching the gaming community's reaction to SimCity's launch over the last week and a half, and it's impressive to see that community taking action to try to fix the myriad disappointments in the game as it was released.

Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that they “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers”, and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game” for single player.

People were already perplexed by EA’s explanation of the impossibility of offline play. Kotaku ran a series of tests today, seeing how the game could run without an internet connection, finding it was happy for around 20 minutes before it realised it wasn’t syncing to the servers.

A seven-year-old suspended from school for crudely fashioning his breakfast pastry into a gun-like shape and brandishing it in the most menacing fashion a gun-shaped pastry can be wielded.

For some reason, many schools still labor under the delusion that "zero tolerance" equals "tough, but fair." It's neither, and utilizing zero tolerance policies simply prunes the whole process back to a disfigured stump devoid of logic, perspective or context.

The school's logic apparently is that if it vaguely resembles a gun and someone is pretending it's a gun, then it's a gun look-a-like.

In its adolescent years, the U.S. was a hotbed of intellectual piracy and technology smuggling, particularly in the textile industry, acquiring both machines and skilled machinists in violation of British export and emigration laws. Only after it had become a mature industrial power did the country vigorously campaign for intellectual-property protection.

British export controls were finally repealed in 1843 with the spread of free-trade ideology. By that time, the U.S. had established itself as one of the leading industrial economies in the world -- thanks, in no small part, to the successful evasion of British emigration and export prohibitions.

"THE first guy who uses a weapon to bring down a drone that's hovering over his house is going to become a folk hero in this country." So said commentator Charles Krauthammer on Fox News in May last year, after the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said that drones will soon be licensed for law enforcement and commercial surveillance work.

A shake-up of the law is needed, says Peter van Blyenburgh, head of drone trade body Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, based in Paris, France. He says small drones, like the $300 Parrot AR Drone, sold as a toy, could become a real neighbourhood nuisance, provoking risky shoot-downs.

As a result of an ongoing dispute between Google (YouTube's parent company) and GEMA, the primary German performance rights organization, a number of Russian YouTube videos have been blocked from within Germany. The reason? These videos contain background music playing from a Russian car radio.

“YouTube has no insight into what rights GEMA represents,” the Google subsidiary wrote. “Due to the legal and financial risks that result from these processes in the context of GEMA’s [published royalty fee structure], music videos are blocked in Germany.”

Hidden in the report’s footnotes is an amazing admission: despite $1.1 billion in U.S. profits in 2012, Facebook did not pay even a dime in federal and state income taxes.

Instead, Facebook says it will receive net tax refunds totaling $429 million.

So in total Facebook’s current and future tax reductions from the stock options exercised in connection with its IPO will total $3.2 billion.

What makes her story so extraordinary, though, is that she made the mistake in May 2010. Every month since – for more than two years – her pay was going into someone else's Nationwide account. And now, to her horror, Sally is discovering she has almost no chance of getting back a penny of the £26,650 transferred in error.

Sally is not rich. They live in a modest semi, her husband works in the public sector, and they have a joint income of less than £50,000. "We live a simple life; we are quite frugal. We even went overdrawn on that account for a while and cut back as a result."