Why is the issue of sexual orientation so explosive that the very act of saying the word "gay" or "lesbian" is sometimes against the rules? Bioware found itself on the wrong end of this controversy when a community manager gracelessly began locking threads that discussed the issue, and then claimed that there simply were no gay or lesbian characters in Star Wars. Maybe those words don't exist in galaxies far, far, away, but the characters often do: Bioware themselves created a game with a character who laid down with another woman as with a man.

Sony was a part of a similar controversy after the words "gay" and "Jew" were edited out of Home, the company's social online service for PS3 owners. And Microsoft made headlines when the company banned a player who self-identified as a lesbian, claiming any notice of sexual orientation was against the terms of service.

In some ways it's unfair to take the world of gaming to task for its immature handling of gay and lesbian issues. After all, it's hard to find a game that takes any kind of relationship seriously. This is an art form that knows how to show two people killing each other nearly perfectly, but seems to turn into a bunch of fifth-graders when dealing with a kiss, much less when that kiss is between two men or two women. It's clear that something has to give, although companies only seem to pay attention after receiving the wrong kind of attention for their policies.

Why is the issue of sexual orientation so explosive that the very act of saying the word "gay" or "lesbian" is sometimes against the rules? Bioware found itself on the wrong end of this controversy when a community manager gracelessly began locking threads that discussed the issue, and then claimed that there simply were no gay or lesbian characters in Star Wars. Maybe those words don't exist in galaxies far, far, away, but the characters often do: Bioware themselves created a game with a character who laid down with another woman as with a man.

Sony was a part of a similar controversy after the words "gay" and "Jew" were edited out of Home, the company's social online service for PS3 owners. And Microsoft made headlines when the company banned a player who self-identified as a lesbian, claiming any notice of sexual orientation was against the terms of service.

In some ways it's unfair to take the world of gaming to task for its immature handling of gay and lesbian issues. After all, it's hard to find a game that takes any kind of relationship seriously. This is an art form that knows how to show two people killing each other nearly perfectly, but seems to turn into a bunch of fifth-graders when dealing with a kiss, much less when that kiss is between two men or two women. It's clear that something has to give, although companies only seem to pay attention after receiving the wrong kind of attention for their policies.

If you're an Ars Technica reader, you probably think you have this DTV transition thing down. How complicated could it be? All stations are shutting down their analog over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts on June 12, the government is handing out $40 coupons for converter boxes, and old analog TVs will soon display every OTA channel in even higher quality than before.

Except that it's quite a bit more complicated than that. For instance, signal quality will decrease for some; analog OTA stations will continue to broadcast after the transition; and June 12 is not actually the national switchover date. Show of hands: how many people knew that the entire state of Hawaii made the switch back in January?

If you're an Ars Technica reader, you probably think you have this DTV transition thing down. How complicated could it be? All stations are shutting down their analog over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts on June 12, the government is handing out $40 coupons for converter boxes, and old analog TVs will soon display every OTA channel in even higher quality than before.

Except that it's quite a bit more complicated than that. For instance, signal quality will decrease for some; analog OTA stations will continue to broadcast after the transition; and June 12 is not actually the national switchover date. Show of hands: how many people knew that the entire state of Hawaii made the switch back in January?

When we last took an in-depth look at USB flash drives in 2005, the landscape was a bit different. A 2GB drive ran nearly $200, and speeds were quite a bit slower then. At the time, we noted that while the then-current crop of drives was pretty fast, they still were not close to saturating the bandwidth of USB2. To top it off, a good drive was still going to set you back $50 or $70—not exactly a cheap proposition. Since our first roundup, this picture has changed considerably, and it leads to a question: has the flash drive become an undifferentiated commodity, just like any other cheap plastic tsotschke that you might find at an office supply store checkout counter?

When we last took an in-depth look at USB flash drives in 2005, the landscape was a bit different. A 2GB drive ran nearly $200, and speeds were quite a bit slower then. At the time, we noted that while the then-current crop of drives was pretty fast, they still were not close to saturating the bandwidth of USB2. To top it off, a good drive was still going to set you back $50 or $70—not exactly a cheap proposition. Since our first roundup, this picture has changed considerably, and it leads to a question: has the flash drive become an undifferentiated commodity, just like any other cheap plastic tsotschke that you might find at an office supply store checkout counter?

In the first article in our two-part series on virtualization, we asked the IT pros in the Ars forums to share their tips and best practices for first-time virtualization deployments. The results were extremely useful, and we got plenty of positive reader feedback on the effort. So for this second and final installment, we asked those same users about the future of virtualization, and about what they see as the next phase in this fast-moving trend's evolution. Their answers provide a glimpse at where the folks in the IT trenches expect virtualization to go, and at what they hope to see happen in the near- to medium-term.

In the first article in our two-part series on virtualization, we asked the IT pros in the Ars forums to share their tips and best practices for first-time virtualization deployments. The results were extremely useful, and we got plenty of positive reader feedback on the effort. So for this second and final installment, we asked those same users about the future of virtualization, and about what they see as the next phase in this fast-moving trend's evolution. Their answers provide a glimpse at where the folks in the IT trenches expect virtualization to go, and at what they hope to see happen in the near- to medium-term.