But amidst a growing call to stem the bleeding, game makers may be missing the greatest opportunity to connect with players that they’ve ever witnessed.

Sony’s PlayStation 3 has recently been the subject of an industry outcry as the latest system to fall victim to enterprising thieves. Credit the launch of the PS Jailbreak, a plug-and-play USB device that lets you copy retail games to, and play them from, the system’s hard drive.  MORE

Rule 2: The world doesn’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

hot new smartphone can be Incredible, Vibrant, Epic or just “eh,” but no matter how it stacks up, it’s a safe bet that it will start selling at $199.

On the four major wireless networks — Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ – News), AT&T (NYSE: T – News), Sprint (NYSE: S – News) and T-Mobile — there are 13 smartphones priced at $199 with a two-year contract. There are no phone models with a higher starting price (add-ons like more memory can increase the price tag), and there are more smartphones selling at $199 than at any other single price point.

But spending $199 doesn’t guarantee you a top-of-the-line phone. On AT&T’s network, $199 will buy an iPhone 4, the best-selling smartphone of all time. But you’ll need to fork over the same amount for a BlackBerry Bold 9700, a nine-month-old phone that lacks a touch screen.  MORE

Someday, they’ll build wireless Internet into every building, just the way they build in running water, heat and electricity today. Someday, we won’t have to drive around town looking for a coffee shop when we need to check our e-mail.

If you want ubiquitous Internet today, though, you have several choices. They’re all compromised and all expensive.

You could get online using only a smartphone, but you’ll pay at least $80 a month and you’ll have to view the Internet through a shrunken keyhole of a screen. ou could equip your laptop with one of those cellular air cards or U.S.B. sticks, which cost $60 a month, but you’d be limited to 5 gigabytes of data transfer a month (and how are you supposed to gauge that?). You could use tethering, in which your laptop uses your cellphone as a glorified Internet antenna — but that adds $20 or $30 to your phone bill, has a fixed data limit and eats through your phone’s battery charge in an hour.

Last year, you could hear minds blowing coast to coast when Novatel introduced a new option: the MiFi. It creates a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot that, because it’s the size of a porky credit card, can go with you everywhere. The MiFi gets its Internet signal from a 3G cellphone network and converts it into a Wi-Fi signal that up to five people can share.  MORE

In a blow to Net neutrality advocates, who were hoping for sweeping new rules as early as this month, federal regulators suggested Wednesday that they’re delaying any action in the near future.

The Federal Communications Commission said it will be conducting a “further inquiry” into the details of broadband regulation, including whether wireless networks should be exempted from strict Net neutrality rules, a concept that Google and Verizon recently endorsed. (Here’s some background from last year on wireless regulation.)

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Long before the iPhone, the iPod was the device that helped transform Apple from computer company into a consumer electronics company.

But today, the ubiquitous music player has become less relevant to the company that essentially owns that product category.

Apple still sells three-fourths of all MP3 players sold, but multifunction gadgets like the iPhone and iPad are getting the most attention from Apple customers, not to mention the rest of the electronics industry, and bringing in more revenue than iPods these days.

So when Apple convenes a special event in San Francisco to discuss music this Wednesday — as it has every September for the last five years — we think that Steve Jobs and Co. will touch on the iPod but also talk more broadly about media, including a more evolved iTunes and new ways to watch content in the living room.  MORE

The facts: On August 27, 1891, a passenger train jumped the tracks on a tall bridge near Statesville, North Carolina, sending seven rail cars below and about 30 people to their deaths.

The legend: On the wreck’s anniversary, the sounds of screeching wheels, screaming passengers and a horrific crash might still be heard. You might also see a uniformed man with a gold watch.

Shortly before 3 a.m. Friday, on the 119th anniversary of the Bostian Bridge train tragedy and at about the same time, between 10 and 12 ghost hunters were on that approximately 300-foot long span.

They were hoping to hear the sounds of the crash, and perhaps see something.

Instead, a real Norfolk-Southern train — three engines and one car — turned the corner as it headed east to Statesville, about 35 miles north of Charlotte, authorities said.  MORE

Who was the foremost member of the foremost group of all time? Was Paul McCartney or John Lennon the real driving force behind the Beatles? That question has ignited debates for decades. Rolling Stone’s new special issue, The Beatles’ 100 Greatest Songs, doesn’t answer the question (nothing ever will), but it sheds some light on it.

Of the 100 songs, which were ranked by the editors of Rolling Stone, 40 were written by Lennon, 35 by McCartney, 17 by the two men working together and eight by George Harrison, who came into his own as a songwriter on the Beatles’ final albums.  MORE

There have been several reports of privacy scams on Facebook, and “Facebook ghosts” have surfaced as a new iteration of the trend.

Earlier this month, Yahoo! Sports created a ton of buzz when it reported one NFL team allegedly uses fake Facebook profiles to tempt recruits into unknowingly handing over their personal information.

One popular Facebook “ghost” was a blond female temptress, the site reports. VIEW MORE