I found Tachyon: The Fringe quite amusing as well.

Although that was mostly despite of the gameplay, not because of it. Weird storylines(preventing a space pirate from taking off with the stolen Sistine Chapel on a barge), good voiceacting, etc.

I know, I have been a Linux user since kernel 1.2 series, but this is different.

Shooting somebody is worse than any disks, so yes, a few, compared to your bank manager or other legal thiefs anyway.

Sorry to distract to a sideline of this conversation but the Gnome thing is a symptom of a wider problem in the GNU/Linux world at this moment.

There is a war going on, a pityful money grabbing one packaged as an idiological one.

Simple said, Canonical and Red Hat are both undermining the GPL by changing the progammable environment into extreme complex beasts so that all others (not backed by lots of r&d money and lawyers) lose entrance to the material wheter it is GPL or not does not matter anymore, the entrance is too high.
They do it under a guise of having idiological Issues with each other, one backing Gnome and the other Unity.

Recently even the Kernel developers got caught into this mess, having Linus calling some maintainer of UDEV a lier.
Google UDEV and systemd to see the whole gory mess, and mind my words, this is only the beginning of the troubles in GNU/Linux land.

Surfaces are the photo of the real object, the trouble with surfaces is that you have to calculate the deception, and in the end the real thing will need much less energy.

We would not be able to be here if nature wasn't so efficient as it is, so taking natures algorithms and paterns to solve our space/time dilemma's is not such a bad idea.

It seems you got more chance to get a minimal sentence when you shoot your procecutor than copy a few disks.

This sort of imbalances in the judicial system will cost the country dearly in the end.

Does the title come with a robe and a hat?

There's nothing particularly rational about either one, it's about what people want.

Actually, there is, and the same applies to a lot of other subjects, like for example drug prohibition.

There are plenty of different systems and methods that demonstrably do or do not work. It really isn't all that hard to look at them and point that out. There's nothing wrong with deliberately choosing not to use a system that works for reasons of principle, but in that case we could at least be honest and consistent about it.

If a nation or a state chooses to make health insurance optional, based on principles of freedom and individual responsibility, then do it properly. Let the corpses of those who were stupid or irresponsible pile up outside the ER for all to see.

Same thing with drug prohibition. It demonstrably doesn't work, it costs tons of money and there's a remarkable correlation between wanting to forbid it and believing in invisible men in the sky, so let's at least have some *honest* reasons why it should be disallowed.

You make a decent argument, and then provide the best reason why it is flawed.

If the current crop of politicians, who are mostly lawyers, are clearly and demonstrably unable to do a proper job, how do you know the baker and the mechanic won't do a better one?

Besides, politicians have to pass a lot of tests. The thing is that the electorate chooses to test on incredibly important subjects such as hair, teeth, flagpin wearing and the ability to spout immense amounts of bullshit instead of looking at minor details such as principles, realism and actual good ideas.

Let's face it, even if someone who is clearly principled and who actually tells the truth were to run, he/she wouldn't stand a chance. We don't want "leaders" who tell us the truth, we want ones that tell us that we're the ones doing just fine and everything would be peachy if it weren't for $them.

Exemptions are made when it concerns e-mail or telephone calls where the purpose is reading/listening in for quality monitoring.

When comparing Western European power usage to that in the US, bear in mind that in western Europe we often heat our homes and water using natural gas. 1 cubic meter of natural gas has the energy equivalent of roughly 10 kWh (36MJ), so this tends to make US consumption look really exaggerated.

A typical Dutch household for example uses about 3000 kWH of electricity and 1800 cubic meters of natural gas per year.

I'm guessing you live in a relatively small apartment :)

They were pretty much told to bugger off. Because that is how banana republics roll.

In other news, democracy is now officially for export only.

Where innovating is a nice way of saying "funneling public money to private buddies and corrupting the electoral process while you're at it".

The most staggering part, however, is that US elections aren't followed by a spree of arrests. Then again, the DA who would have to prosecute is an elected official as well. Round and round she goes, where she is, nobody knows.

Actually, it isn't. It may pick up on basic accelerating and decelerating and shift accordingly, but it's not psychic. An automatic does not know I want to overtake and need the revs *right now*, nor does it know why I'm taking my foot off the throttle.

A semi-automatic that allows for overriding the base selections is an option, but even then I'd be very reluctant to give up the extra control that working the clutch provides.

So that's the answer to step ????? before "Profit!"? God ads....

Damn, I'm disappointed.