This is a test response. You should ignore it

I'd like to know why having a deaf culture is preferable to not having any deaf people.

Next you'll be wanting to bring back leper colonies so we don't lose leper culture.

If a new product comes along that is cheaper and more desired by consumers the old product becomes a dead market? What fascinating insight! How can I pay money to see more news from this "Murdoch" guy?

Someone blogged about some things he doesn't like and made the front page of slashdot.

Basically, more games have character progression in them where you improve your character and/or equipment while playing and he thinks this is a bad idea for competitive multiplayer games.

You do know that an isk is not worth a dollar right?

Consider either the cost to buy 60B isk from currency sellers, or take the total man-hours needed to make a Titan and multiply by minimum wage, and then you'll have a much more useful figure representing how my *real* value was invested in those ships.

"annihilated amidst controversy"? When has there ever been any significant battle in Eve that didn't feature people blaming server issues for their loss? (often correctly, I might add)

Just wait for the iPhone app, so you can use your mobile connection to break into the faster wifi broadband.

The big difference is in Second Life those micro transactions are between players; Linden Labs takes a cut only when players convert ingame currency back into real money.

Technically Russia is part of Asia.

From the point of view of Australia having water locked into glacier instead of raining down on our farmland is a crisis.

So if we all start geo-engineering rainfall on a global level what happens when one country wants water that other countries also want? What stops us geo-engineering our deserts to steal your rain? Who sets a quota describing how much rain we're allowed to have, and how will that be enforced?

There are some big technical problems with this plan, but there are also massive social and political problems to be overcome also.

If an article went up describing how a major vendor released a petabyte array for $2M the comments would full of people saying "I could make an array with that much storage far cheaper!"

Now someone has gone and done exactly that (they even used linuxto do it) and suddenly everyone complains that it lacks support from a major vendor.

This may not be perfect for everyones needs, but it's nice to see this sort of innovation taking place instead of blindy following the same path everyone else takes for storage.

What exactly is a "color professional photograph"? Landscapes? Portraits? Group shots? Sports photography? Photo journalism? Abstracts? Artistic Nudes?

This may be an interesting programming toy but it has little to no use in the real world, unless you have a desire to locate generically boring pictures built to formula. (or, generically boring pictures that have been run through the "ALIPR Picture Score Optimizer" Photoshop filter)

The "theoretical" ways to read data off a zero'ed disk involve looking at a bit on the platter, seeing how close to 0 it is and using that to figure out what it used to be. If it is "0.01" it was probably a zero before, if it's "0.2" it might have been a one. If the disk controller rounds everything down to zero, that isn't possible... which is why the drive needs to be opened up, and why a challenge that requires you to read data from a zero'ed disk without opening up the drive is meaningless.

The import tool may make use of photoshop layers to simplify the process of moving from your image work to actual level; it could also be able to make use of alpha maps and similar extra channels that more common image formats like jpeg lack.

If the tool already exists for the developers, and it already is designed to work with .PSD files (because that is what they use in their workflow) then it might not support other layered image formats.