I'm planning on the lines that anything to do with the $ is risky in the medium term. Check out what BRIC is getting up to and you'll see why.

Time will tell. I don't need to calm down. I'm perfectly calm but I can see what's happening and huge amounts of money with nowhere else to go are flowing into the stock market currently.

Yes. Though I believe that has something to do with the way it loads chunks. It may not actually know at that point that those caverns are *not* in front of your face and the fact that you can see the caverns implies that it *has* attempted to not display blocks that you wouldn't be able to see (otherwise you would see the flat face of the chunk the cavern was in instead).

But yes, it is perfectly possible to have millions of blocks in your field of view even when things are behaving as they should and all hidden blocks are being correctly removed from the rendering.

Yep, OpenGL. Minecraft needs some horsepower to run because it's rendering millions of blocks, long distance viewing is important to the game and because it's so flexible, there's a lot of optimization tricks that simply can't be done. The actual game engine part is fairly trivial and doesn't really suffer from being in Java at all (and believe me, I'm no Java fanboy).

Wrong!

We're in a whole-stockmarket bubble. There's not many good places to run.

I'm looking forward to the "Added shark and waterskis" update.

It's funny, you speak of "no meaning" as if you have a scientific basis for this. Unless you do, your opinion is no more valid than the guy strapping a bomb on himself to get 72 virgins, and no less dogmatic. Not everyone defines "meaning" is as narrow a manner as you.

For starters, deism isn't a religion, which makes the rest of the comment not worth bothering with.

Roundabouts lead to improved traffic flow over a four way stop and often can be navigated with little to no slowing down. They are not (usually) for traffic calming.

True. But that is the wrong attitude and if it an be forced to adjust, that may be a good thing.

I've been deistic for decades. It discounts the idea that god is an old man on the mountain, but maintains the idea that there is purpose and meaning to everything, not just man.

I was telling my daughter about Populus, a game I played on my friend's Amiga back in the day. With the craze for remakes, I had a quick search and was pleasantly surprised to find it was a Kick-starter project called "Godus". Then I read the contributor feedback. My god, they screwed the pooch on that one.

I hear it was being driven by an 80 year old Floridian.

Apparently it had its right-turn indicator on all the way.

As you point out, not all birds of a feather stick together. I'm not a Tea Party guy. I'm just not closed minded enough to judge a friend by their politics. If you only have friends that agree with your politics, you are probably narrow minded or take politics too seriously.

Has the United States of America become a member of The Totalitarian Club ?

Yes. Each President has been moving in this direction more and more, but Obama has managed to overreach even more than those before him. Take the IRS, for instance. I personally know of people who have been getting involved with Tea Party politics and now are getting audited. Like their politics or not (it doesn't matter), that is totalitarianism, which means the next time a GOP'er gets in, he can do the same thing. It isn't a good time to be an American.