I dont' know about Canada or USA, but here in Norway, if a politician is caught lying or cheating on the tax or other bad things, they will get a lot of negative press. So much press that we have recently had two politicians resign in the last year, and others, like Thorbjørn Jagland and Kjell Magne Bondevik, going to hospital. Psychological stress they called it. Does this happen in other countries?

If we created an AI, wouldn't we be responsible for it's well being? What if it is full of angst, and the simulation is running really fast. What would you do with chronic angst and nothing to do for two years? I had chronic angst for three weeks, then I couldn't take it anymore and tried to end my life. I'm glad I was able to have that escape, but a computer simulation may not... If God created everything we can percieve, wouldn't he be responsible for all the human and animal suffering?

Battlefield 2. You can apply for Commander during the start of the game, the one with the highest rank gets it, and then you can see the battlefield top-down and order (real!) squads around, drop vehicles and target the artillery. If it is played correctly with VoIP and good squads it is quite an experience.

Clearly? It's not clear at all. Please refer to GNU's definiton of free. From what I've observed, all the big name "FOSS" licences treat open source as having access to the code and free as having freedom to do what you wish with that source. I don't think any of them require being without cost.

Just to adress the cost of PC gaming. You'll want a new PC every other year, or third year, depending of how fast the CPU is, and how low the resolution you are willing to play in. Until the game have so many polygons so the setup engine in your 3d accelerator, you can get decent FPS. If you buy two games every month, and one game is an overage $16 cheaper then console games, and you pick up a good oldies you missed last year at extreme discount, you can be ahead of console games by almost $400. Three years and you are two thirds the cost of a brand new almost high end PC. Today that would be a Core i7 920, GeForcxe GTX 285 and 6 GIG ram on a decent motherboard.

Two words: "Firefox" and "Adblock"

What about a plugin that only disables gif/svg animations and flash plugin?
If many people block everything they will just add more ads, and more annoying ads. Like ads that refresh every 10 seconds (I encountered that today at www.techarp.com actually.). Better to have tolerant ads than no independent websites.