Cars are different but they all use the same system. As compared to computers you could almost say there is only two different car operating systems, standard and automatic. No matter what the hardware looks like (the car model) all your automatic cars are going to have a steering wheel in the same place, two pedals that do the same thing, a similar/same gear shifter, etc. You can jump into any car and know how it operates regardless of model; that's pretty much the same as having different computers (hardware) running the same OS.

Not if you use a trackball, which works incredibly well with a laptop in my experience :)

I think most people would be fine with the length of the Hobbit if it only included stuff that actually needed to be in the movie.

It all depends on how much material they actually have to work with. I don't want to watch a 2 hour movie stretched in to 3, and I don't want to watch a 3 hour movie cut down to 2. The Hobbit was the former.

Two things:

First, I think that most people here feel that technical patents are somewhat more valid than design patents. While there are a number of people who think that patents as a whole are bad, but most people think that patents are okay, it's patents on things like "rounded corners" (aka design patents) that people dislike.

Secondly, if you attack someone who attacks you, are you being offensive or defensive? It's not immediately clear if retaliating after being attacked is a defensive action or an offensive one.

The Goa'uld are not gods! :)

I find that the best way to take notes depends very much on the specific nature of the class you are taking. For math courses, programming courses, (some) science courses, or anything else where you need to be able to draw or use numbers, pen (or mechanical pencil) and regular old notebook work best.

For classes that are mostly text based, such as social sciences, history, or English courses, I find that typing my notes out in outline format (on a laptop) to be preferable.

/woosh

As some other posters have said, pretty much all of those stores (Google play as well as Amazon) accept debit cards just fine. I do not and never have had a credit card, but I buy stuff online all the time with my debit.

There's nothing special about my debit card either, it's just a regular plain old debit card issued from the bank. Well, credit union actually, if that makes a difference.

If it's not better then why do games that allow K&M on consoles have to create separate rooms for K&M players and gamepad players?

I'll tell you why, because in the mixed rooms the K&M players destroy the gamepad players.

Now obviously if everyone is using the same control scheme it doesn't matter how "good" it is, because everyone is using the same crap. However, if you let K&M players play against gamepad players in an FPS the gamepad players will get destroyed.

For other kinds of games, such as action or fighting games, the gamepad is preferred for me. But that doesn't mean I deny that K&M is better for FPS.

You're forgetting that all the emo kids are wearing skinny jeans that barely fit a pack of gum these days :)

Remove bad parents?

I'm a conservative and I personally don't know any conservatives who like the TSA. We consider it another example of an overgrown government.

However, the conservatives I tend to be around are probably different than the type you are thinking of. Not all conservatives are rednecks living in trailers, just like not all liberals are actually hippies sitting around in drum circles.

Or maybe they think that no matter how bad he would still be better than Romney?

South Park was right when they satirized our political system as voting between a doucebag and a turd sandwich. The only thing that will truly change our country would be to change the actual political system itself, and that will never happen.

The fact that you can activate skills without a target is actually one of the biggest selling points. It makes the game feature more "action-like" combat rather than standard fare turn-based mmo combat.

And honestly, I don't see how this would affect immersion negatively. What's less realistic, being able to shoot your gun, regardless of whether it hits anyone or not, or your gun telling you that you're out of range if you try to shoot it from too far away?

Sort of. It's an actual persistent world now, just like other mmos.

The world is broken up into zones, like the continents in WoW (only not quite as big); but for pretty much all purposes you will actually notice in playing, it's fully persistent.