Do your steak dinners have the grill lines printed on them using fructose so you can just stick it in the oven and have it come out with the nicely blackened and caramelised lines that people in the USA associate with "nicely cooked" steaks?

Check "Vitamin water" or "Gatorade" style drinks amongst others. There are sports water drinks that aren't flavoured or coloured that also contain sugar to help you drink it faster - a problem that is easier addressed by maintaining hydration rather than recovering from dehydration.

Go check the bottled waters such as "Vitamin Water". Even the unflavoured "sports" water products have fructose in them, usually in the form of HFCS. They will even admit to you that the fructose is there to help you drink more, faster.

My post was modded "Troll" and misinterpreted as "satire" because Slashdot basement virgins don't want to face the fact that it's their cheesey poofs, gatorade and burrito burgers that are making them fat.

Perhaps someone needs to read the poem "My Country" by Dorothea Mackellar. Australia has always had long dry spells (in Australia, a drought is a dry spell that lasts longer than two years - as opposed to the UK or New Zealand where a drought is a dry spell lasting more than a couple of weeks). We've had massive floods before - this is nothing new. The droughts are getting longer and more frequent, but that just exacerbates the problems of heavy rainfall leading to flooding. Ask a soil scientist about the water-holding capability of claypans versus loamy soil, and the contribution of water-holding capability to flooding during heavy rainfall.

It's interesting that you link to the "Climategate" Wikipedia entry with the words "suspect at best" when the article seems to indicate that most reviews of the "climategate" situation indicate that the "massaging" was required to get sets of disparate data to use the same scale of units (eg: massaging temperature records from Darwin to cope with changes in measuring equipment, and later relocation of the measuring post from a post office to an airport).

The freezing of Europe (temperature extremes at both ends of the scale, and subsequent ice age) is one of the outcomes predicted by global warming researchers (the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" was based on the book "The Coming Global Superstorm") - I don't see how pointing out that the freezing is actually happening constitutes a rebuttal of Global Warming Science which predicts the freezing will happen.

One flood in Australia does not refute global warming science. Droughts followed by floods are nothing new for us, and we've often had floods followed immediately by long dry spells which become droughts. The droughts are getting longer and drier and closer together, so yes, Australia is drying up - and the floods are getting worse because of the drying up.

The moral of the story is... don't keep living in a town when you've spent the last three years helping kill their friends and family.

I really don't think there's much comparison between lynch mobs and the Third Reich.

In order to cut back on HFCS consumption, you have to avoid all the alternatives to whatever it was that had the HFCS in it in the first place, which themselves have HFCS in them.

Thus switching from cola to water isn't going to help when bottled water contains as much HFCS as the cola does. Switching from candy to no snacks at all requires reworking your diet to provide regular meals, but then you have to avoid HFCS in the meals that you're now eating to reduce your candy habit.

Even steak dinners have HFCS in them, to help the caramelisation when you bake the steak in the oven.

In the USA these days, the only way to avoid HFCS is to grow the vegetables yourself, collect rainwater to drink, and avoid meat.

Or move to a different country where the corn industry isn't dictating what people eat.

American egos happened.

"I got conned," versus, "I was the victim of a social engineering attack."

Being a victim isn't as embarrassing as being stupid.

75% of the web requires Flash? Which Internet are you on? YouTube doesn't require Flash. The only reason there's a Flash player installed on any computer in my house is so the girlfriend can play that stupid farming game.

As for "self-driving cars" - they're called taxis, busses, trains, or chauffeur-driven limousines. Though most people get by quite happily with an automatic transmission and a car computer that tells them when services are due.

I think you'll find that your sarcasm detector is not working. But since it didn't have a light on the dashboard to tell you it wasn't even installed, you didn't know that you had to get one :)

People who don't get sarcasm shouldn't be using the Internet.

More importantly, when you get your friend to join the game, they can go and play with you right from the first second they log in.

There are no level caps on instances, so you can fly your Velator (rookie ship) alongside your friend's carrier while clearing out a 10/10 plex. The game won't stop you being social.

In WoW, you have to get your friend to level to 80 before they can join your raids. So either you drop out of raids for three months while you run your friend's character through instances, or you ignore your friend for three months while he levels in PUGs.

Even worse, if your friend wants to try playing another class - there's another three months that they're not playing the same game as you!

In EVE if you want to fly a different class of ship, you'll have some lead up skills (eg: training Minmatar Frigate 4 in order to fly Minmatar Cruisers), but most of the weapon skills translate (unless you're moving from a turret to a launcher ship), and all of the engineering, electronics, mechanic and drone skills are portable.

Today you're flying an Omen and firing pew pew lazors, next week you're flying a Guardian and being a space cleric. The next week you're wandering through w-space in an astrometrics frigate.

And your friend's day-old character is right there with you, having fun and being useful.

You're flat out ignoring the fact that most combat will end up with five ships focussing fire on one ship. Regeneration of shields or armour through local repairers, or even in a RR fleet doesn't count when one salvo from the enemy fleet obliterates all your HP.

ie: you can't quaff a health potion when you're dead.

A typical expression amongst mission runners is "gank tank" - where you specialise in dealing damage in order to reduce the incoming damage (by killing the bad guys before they kill you).

For PvPers, the preference is for "buffer tank" - slap on a few armour plates which double or triple your ship's innate HP, get into a fight and hope you can burn the other guy's HP away before he gets through yours (this is also why tackle ships are important - you don't want them fleeing the fight to repair their buffer).

There are different tanking styles: passive, active, buffer, speed and gank. Each one works a different way (with passive and active being the most closely related).

Having 5% more innate HP due to Mechanic 5 will help you a teensy bit, but being able to fit 1600mm Rolled Tungsten plates gives you a much larger boost to HP. Being able to fit meta 4 blasters might mean you'll do more DPS than the guy with the T2 blasters, since his ammo impedes his tank (he can't move as fast).

And despite all the 5% bonuses here and there that the all-5 player has, that doesn't make up for the difference in firepower when you bring more friends than he has.

He might be flying a T2 fitted Brutix, but you'll rip him to pieces because you and your three friends flying Imicus frigates have good drone skills, cold-gas arcjet afterburners, and tracking disruptors.

Flying tackler frigates in EVE Online is quite enjoyable - you just have to get used to the idea that in this game, things blow up and you don't just run back to your corpse to start playing exactly where you left off.

You can be flying a battleship in a month, and have it T2 geared in about 8 months. After that, you can keep flying T2 ships. But EVE is more fun when you're pushing the limits - tackling in an assault ship for example. Doing silly things because other people don't expect it, and getting away with it.

The game's not about "catching up", it's about finding something to do that you enjoy. You don't have to fly a T2 batleship to have fun - you could fly a covops astrometrics frigate and act as a forward observer/scout/covert cyno pilot. For those who don't know EVE, a Cynosaural field is a marker for capital ships to jump to, so rather than being a forward observer watching where the artillery is hitting, you're the guy opening the door for the big guns to arrive through.

Most of the combat in EVE is decided before ships start shooting at each other - it relies on military intelligence, spies infiltrating enemy corporations, analysis of markets, interdicting supplies - there's a lot of strategy involved for those who'd care to take part in the game.

The intelligence, market analysis and interdiction is all important - people flying fast tackle frigates are just as important as people lighting cynos for cap ships, and just as important as the guys running materiel back and forth to keep stations running, ships fuelled and ammo supplied.

You might end up buying a character who was hated - big deal. Lie low, learn to use that character, then rebuild the reputation for yourself.

EVE, more than any other game, is about being social and learning to deal with other people. In WoW you are rewarded for being an ass (roll need on everything, who cares). In EVE, being an ass will affect you to the point that you want to sell your character to escape the consequences of your actions.

How will the advertisers get the money if the users aren't going to pay for stuff?

My first thought was, "if it costs money to run the service, it should cost money to use the service."

More intrusive ads will not help anyone.

I, too, am terribly upset over the ongoing process of locking down anything and everything. The fact that I can't tinker with the contents of my fluorescent lights, that I need a special licence to mess with the contents of the toaster, and am outright prohibited from building my own nuclear reactor in my backyard are all setting the world back 20 years in technological advancement.

In the meantime I'm glad that I have access to the free development environment of XCode on a Mac which lets me emulate devices such as the iPod and iPad, so I can mess around with software projects without actually buying a $800 slate that I don't need.

That's exactly how I see it - the iPod/iPhone platform (hardware, software, app store) is so successful exactly because there is no configuration which will lead the user into a broken install.

Apple has succeeded with the iPhone because they are taking the difficult choices away from the user. Apple are screening the apps for minimal quality control, so the user doesn't end up with a dozen half-arsed apps that chew up battery life and leave the device in odd states.