Don't we already have examples of skeletons that are mixtures of Neandertal and Cro-Magnon features?

Also note that Cro-magnons had skull shapes somewhat similar to Neandertals (prognathous, low-browed, pronounced eyebrow ridges), although they had larger cranial capacity than contemporary H. S. sapiens; and they had the same kind of stature as Neandertals. Intermarriage/interbreeding between the two species would not have been inconceivable, and would not have needed all that much alcohol.

As to inter-fertility, isn't it genus, not species, that tends to be the barrier?

A more solid style of construction wouldn't hurt, either. I remember that a famous anthropology joke/thought-experiment in the '70s -- "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" -- spoke of how most Nacerima buildings were wattle-and-daub, and that's hardly an exaggeration. If we built with brick or stone, we'd have better insulation right there; brick is the low-budget version of semi-subterranean building. (The high-budget version wouldn't hurt either, but it's surprisingly expensive to dig a hole in the ground.)

The other pitfall that you illustrate is that user-created content is a minefield of IP violations. All of your examples except the one people are commenting on could probably get a game shut down, or at least forced to defend itself legally; I seem to recall hearing about this happening to Little Big Planet, and the same problem even crops up with Spore. Its creature-, building-, and vehicle-creators are hardly easy to use, but it has a whole package of Nintendo content (a Wii-controller-shaped factory, a Bob-omb spaceship, etc.), and I myself created a herbivorous boar-person species that was basically Ganon with his serial numbers filed off and minus sixty or eighty extra pounds. (Named and tagged as such, of course...)

This was before I opted for Spore ornithology instead, creating cranes, swans and the like... but even there, I was creating creatures from an existing setting, only I was using the Audubon Guide instead of Hyrule. Birds are probably public-domain by now (assuming "life of the author" doesn't count resurrection), but the same point holds -- these are not original creations.

There was a double layer of irony in the particular case of Spore -- zealous IP protection for a bottled incitement to IP violations...

Correction -- in my comment above, I'd meant Stardock, with the piracy numbers for Demigod. (The same situation occurred with indie darling World of Goo.)

"You wish you could lower your price and gain sales. Well, there's one thing you can do that will not lower your sales at all, and will probably raise them: drop the DRM."

You heard about what happened to Paradox, didn't you?

Well, more like a Dragunov than an AK-47...

So give the Washingtonian this much credit, he at least caught on that it was Warsaw Pact, not NATO. :)

Not that many IEDs in WOW, at least unless the dwarves have been up to something. :)

You are the kind of person who makes it hard for reasonable opponents of Obama to so much as hold their heads up in public!

More seriously and less Scottishly, this is a very good idea. Read _Achilles in Vietnam_ to learn more about PTSD, and you'll see the point. Remember the need for cameraderie mentioned above; PTSD sufferers need to be able to communicate, and this is the most convenient way. Controlled reenactment of battlefield events would be a very useful addition, as a key part of PTSD treatment is learning to overcome and work past the traumatizing event, but this is a real step forward. Heck, the military acknowledging that PTSD so much as _exists_ is a real step forward.

Also remember that the military is managing to look after itself reasonably well under this administration. We should be very glad that Obama's tsars don't have much interest in the army, and thus he's left Gates in office...

By your logic, there was nothing wrong with Guantanamo Bay.

The right answer is not to dive into the ethically dubious (or the ethically outrageous, in the case of using torture); it's to look for the solution that works best, not the solution that sounds scariest. CCTVs are security theater with particularly creepy overtones; sustained police foot patrols are a better way of helping grandmothers, and anyone else. See also my comment just below, linking to Dalrymple on the lack of police commitment.

Theodore Dalrymple's opinion on the matter is that the police in England just don't bother to solve most crimes -- hardly even to investigate them. That their cameras do such a horrible job of helping criminal investigations shouldn't be a surprise, then; technology is only useful if it's used.

On the other hand, it's merciful that this kind of technology is not used. Privacy is an important thing, and it's not at all true that the only people who have cause to desire it are those who have something to hide; and as to controlling crime, it's foot patrols that work, not surveillance.