Say what you want about Lomborg's books (and there is lot to say, no doubt), but there is at least one point he makes that is worth thinking about more carefully:

Wether we know or not how global warming really works, to me the bigger issue is that we are rapidly depleting resources and polluting/screwing up our planet - on so many levels that it is not funny. We have been doing so much crap at such a rapid pace that Lomborg is probably right when he says that we simply won't be able to pay our way out of this mess. And that includes all nations, not just the rich and/or polluting ones.

As a result, you have to do two things: reduce doing crap (again, on many levels), and pay for those solutions to reduce/reverse bad developments that make the most impact. And solutions making the most impact may not necessarily be the "feel good" solutions.

Even though this may seem wrong to many, adding some economic common sense to the whole debate (as Lomborg proposes) makes sense to me, if done right.

Frankly, I don't really care whether humankind is capable of changing the climate and generally screwing things up, because on a fundamental level I believe we simply should not. If we think/know that we are, we should get our act together and try the most effective ways of counteracting those developments. It will be hard. But we certainly know how not pollute etc., if we really wanted to.

Beyond that, the religious wars of who is right when and where really just bore me. All it does is giving people a reason not to do something sensible and productive. Such is humankind, I suppose ...

Nah, they'll use frog DNA and we'll all be safe.

On the bottom of the rock, it was stamped "Made on Mars".

One last thing...you should never talk about any camera view other than the cockpit view if you are talking about a serious racing sim. Who cares if the bumper cam is off (and how would you know...have you drive your car from the bumper before).

Other than that, I enjoyed your post and will probably be buying an Xbox 360 and Forza, because I tried GT5 prologue and was underwhelmed, and frankly, I'm tired of waiting for something I'm starting to believe won't live up to the hype.

Tell the programmer of your application to append ".toupper()" or equivalent to the part of code that receives your input :-)

But you can't prove that they don't not exist, either!

Well, it's a bit of a problem with Ludwig von Drake - when people start questioning his numbers, he gets frustrated easily, steam blows out his ears, and he has a tendency to either grab his papers carelessly and run around them, tear them up in anger, or start babbling like a madman and eat them...

"Privacy is no longer a social norm ...". I suppose that's correct. Stupidity and ignorance have replaced it, among other things. But that's ok with me as long as I continue to have a choice. Besides, those new "norms" can make for good entertainment.

That's an arrogant statement by Schmidt (and yes, I read the whole thing). How often have we heard the "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument over the decades? Add Google to that long list - and it's not an honor roll! I guess "Don't be evil" is leaving the building. It was a matter of time, anyway.

The Germans have a nice saying for that phenomenon: "Vox populi, vox Rindvieh.", which loosely translates to "the voice of the people is the voice of idiots." (more precisely, the voice of stupid cows).

Try actually camping sometime, nude with a pointy stick and a rock to throw at birds. Way to set arbitrary limits for "actual" camping.

Certainly most of the employees wouldn't know that their actual work is used to serve illegitimate activities, otherwise they wouldn't include it in their CV's, how would a web developer know that the site he's working on is promoting a fake product, if you look for more details of the activity elsewhere you would find that these peoples' ultimate goal was to drive users to a form where they would gladly submit their personal and credit card details, TrendWatch wouldn't clearly explain such activities in its white paper for obvious reasons.

Security professionals would understand the meaning behind the attack.

This isn't rocket science or brain surgery. A trojan that sniffs your internet connections' packets and allows interested parties to gain access to the packets sent/received by Skype or any other application could be written mostly with open source libraries already available. It would take some bit of know-how, but nothing extremely specialized. Heck, you could even just stream the user's microphone audio data out and bypass Skype entirely. You could connect directly to the user's web cam - I think there was a virus/trojan that did that already even :)

Which types of vehicles are versatile enough to suit my (and the average American family's) needs.

Fixed that for you.

We used to dream of having .4 GHz computers.