Vote? When the only voting options are two parties that make the _exact_ same decisions?

So you want people to vote, as long as they can't actually affect policy - right.

I'm not claiming it wouldn't have happened, I'm saying in a two party system the electorate can't punish them for this decision to go to war (UK case), or for anything else the general public thinks were bad decisions. So the two parties end up being nearly unaccountable.

Also, the two parties tend to stand for such a broad range of issues, that it's very difficult for the electorate to express what they find good and bad in them. With a coalition government system, if there's an election, and a single party of a coalition takes a hammering while the other parties in the same coalition improve, it gives a much better hint at what the electorate is unhappy with.

I see it in terms of a spectrum with direct democracy (ancient greece style) on one end, and oligarchy or dictatorship on the other end, with the government systems we're discussing somewhere in between. I believe "FPP"/two-party systems are much less democratic and aren't kept in check as much as coalition governments.

Now democracy is a means to an end, i.e. good governance; and if a bit less accountability and more concentration of power leads to better governance, then fine. But that's not what I'm seeing from where I'm sitting. Your claim is that two party system is pandering to the middle. But the way I see it is that the middle is dragged to wherever the two parties want to take it - because the middle has no choice in the matter anyway.

It's my impression that "the middle" in the US seems far more on the right than in a lot of other parts of the world. Is it because the US people are inherently more right wing, or because that's where the two parties went, and for lack of choice the electorate followed?

What do you do when both major parties don't pander to the middle or the will of the general population, and take the country into a direction that the general population doesn't agree with. There's few people who will "risk" not voting for a fringe party in a FPP system.

Take how the war with Iraq was viewed in the UK for instance - the general population was completely against it, it was a very important issue with many lives in the balance, yet both parties were dead set on doing it anyway. How can a voter punish them, really (we'll see what happens om May 6 I suppose)? I'm not from the UK, but from an outside perspective it seems to me that "New Labour" has become pretty much as right wing (I suppose I should say social conservative) as the Tories, based on their decisions in the last ten years.

Coalition governments try to find common ground in their programs. Single (or few) issue parties also make more sense in coaltion governments, and if anything the will of the people gets communicated better to the politicians. IMHO.

Even so, that's at least 2%, and what's left from "a vast majority" that most likely is still licensed under the GPL.

And in addition to this, I suspect you'll have a hard time convincing people that it isn't a "derivative work" of a GPL codebase, even if you have rewritten most of it.

Remember why for example the broadcom reverse engineers have two teams: one to look at and document the proprietary code, and one to implement a driver based on the documentation. They have to make sure the new driver isn't a derivative of the proprietary code - in the Nexuiz case it's in the other direction.

I have no stake in this; I was just curious if things were handled appropriately in this case.

Indeed - there's a few studies that show that excessive prison sentences don't act as a deterrent. Only increasing the likelihood you get caught does.

So criminals don't care whether they'd have to go to prison for 5 years instead of 2. However they do care if they feel that it's twice as likely to get caught than before.

But politicians actively go for the quick fix of increasing prison sentences, instead of improving the organisation and funding of the police and the courts.

I don't think the Gimp UI is perfect, but I don't particularly like the Photoshop UI either. However there's several features and functionality in Photoshop that GIMP could adopt (and I suspect they will soon). But I'm not sure a Photoshop clone (UI wise) is what they should be aiming for.

While I might agree with you on the GPL, do you really think they'd sit down and write a BSD version if there's a LGPL version?

Another option might be a DECT cordless phone network - I vaguely remember it being used in Italian city centres as an alternative to cell phones.

You misunderstood me: you can pick two classes in the beginning, and later on, you can combine your primary class with _any_ secondary class. Also the system of attribute points means you can assign them to whatever skills you want - you get a certain number of points relative to your level, and then you just create specific builds for specific tasks. So one minute I can use a secondary healer build, and the next minute I can swap all my attribute points out and assign them to an offensive type magic for example.

The difficulty becomes combining a limited amount of skills you've unlocked (8 per build), and _NOT_ grinding for XP in a certain skill. The level is capped very low, because they want to avoid people needing to grind (everyone ends up quite quickly at lvl 20, the maximum). Anything that lets me avoid grinding for XP for a level or XP for a specific skill is a plus.

But I do see now that the UO system is different.

A bit like Guild Wars then? In GW, you can choose a "secondary" profession, and later in the game, you can change the secondary profession freely. It becomes quite interesting to see what combinations of skills work well.

I think there just isn't a lot of room on the market for subscription-based games. I suspect most people will have a budget for one or so, and they will have invested quite a bit of time in it - so there's very little incentive to switch.

I think the Guild Wars model is much better: you pay for the game, you play for free. If you decide to stop for a few months, and pick it up later - no problem. If you decide you like the game and want access to more content, you buy the expansion packs.

Raw network latency would not be the only contributing factor to the overall latency. Just imagine the latency introduced by the audio and video encoding (their infrastructure) and decoding (the minimal hardware at home). Plus all the tricks they'll have to pull to scale their infrastructure, etc. I'd be surprised if they can pull it all off.

But who knows, maybe they really have some clever ideas; I'm genuinely curious as to how they'll try and tackle the technical issues.

Yep I meant the latter ;) Let's just bypass everything IE and render with another engine like webkit (triggered by a content-type or meta tag or something). Would people notice?

If I look at my linux install, webkitgtk used by midori takes about 14M, while the flash 10 plugin takes around 10M.

The alternative is waiting until IE8 support can be dropped, around the time IE10 gets well established. I guess poor web developers have a long wait ahead of them still.

Now all we need is a webkit plugin for IE8 and below. ... only half serious.

Here is what you want: Atom 330 + ION + PCI-E/16

http://www.techpowerup.com/93687/Point_of_View_Releases_its_First_NVIDIA_ION_Mainboards.html

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13577&Itemid=37

139.00 EUR it says.