I recently bought Civ 3 and 4, and found that in the progression from 2 to 3 to 4 the civ leaders got... excessively cute. It's silly enough to be talking with Abraham Lincoln in 3000 BC, but in Civ 4 I found Caesar blabbing, "Would you like some salad? I made it myself!" That's just not suitable for a serious game. I figure that in 5, Genghis Khan is probably an anime-eyed sparkly thing with cat ears.

Also, am I the only one who loved the UI in games 1 and 2 and Alpha Centauri? I thought the city screen was an excellent piece of UI design that showed a lot of info in an icon format, eg. 2 blue citizens and 3 reds means trouble. Some of the games moved away from that into the realm of percentages and sliders (especially in the "Call To Power" spinoff series), and I miss that. Even the freeware "FreeCiv" goes with a dull UI. How is it in 5?

It just strikes me that some companies are trying to find new ways to make money from the Internet, and the reaction is "no, you can never deviate from the standards we're used to!". I realize there are arguments for why others can't or shouldn't have to just "build their own roads" to use your analogy. But if we'd had a discussion like this some years ago, wouldn't there have been calls to outlaw e-commerce sites, Flash, or Twitter on the grounds that we must freeze the Net the way it is now? Isn't there some way to let companies experiment with offering non-neutral service in such a way that it's unlikely to Ruin Everything?

Another analogy would be airlines. "Some corporations are proposing to build a network of things called 'airplanes' that'll let people travel without the existing roads. And they'll get to decide what prices to charge and what routes to offer. No fair!"

That sounds very impractical. It's like trying to design a submarine that's also an airplane; you're dealing with two very different sets of engineering requirements. For a road you need a very sturdy, easily repaired surface that has decent traction even when wet, oil-slicked or snowy. For a solar panel you need ability to gather sunlight, cheap electronics, and wiring to some battery or power grid. You're going to end up compromising one goal to work on the other, right?

Hmm, that's true. If (say) Tau is the root cause but it works by causing the BAP plaques, then we only really need to disrupt either of them and it doesn't matter which. It looks like clinical trials are planned for a "vaccine" that attacks the BAP, so hopefully we'll get some useful results from that even if we don't fully understand why it works.

I'd heard years ago that there was dispute between researchers who thought the disease was caused by "beta amyloid plaques" versus by this "tau" protein. Does the test for both show that there's still no consensus on the cause, or has one been established as the cause and the other an effect?

You've noticed that Bush is out of office now, right? The new guy hasn't exactly shut down attempts to spy on us. He also supports Bush's warrantless wiretapping policy, one of Bush's most constitutionally questionable decisions.

Note that under the new health care law, if it stands, the federal government claims the right to order you to buy stupid propaganda games, play them, and write a report on how wonderful they are. IRS is the new DRM!

It's interesting that you would cite local monopolies as the problem. What I expected to see in this thread was, "The feds should do more to build a national broadband infrastructure," with the usual assumption that the US federal government is and should be all-powerful and in charge of controlling the economy.

There might be a valid argument that the Commerce Clause bans state and local governments from imposing regulations that prevent interstate competition, and that such regulations should be struck down. I'm not hopeful about that though, because the same argument applied to health care competition, and Congress' response was a 2000+ page bill it didn't read, meant to create competition only through a massive, centrally-controlled new bureaucracy backed by unprecedented forced-purchase rules.

If Congress moved to "fix" our Net connections the same way, everyone would be ordered to buy broadband or else, and do it through a government-organized collection of ISPs. Michael Moore would be telling everyone that Net access is a fundamental human right and that Cuba does it better. We'd be citing existing regulations as proof of the failure of capitalism, and calling for the government to just take over the whole Net industry.

Actually no, they believe it has a meaning that should be obeyed, and that if you don't like it you should lawfully amend it rather than ignoring it and claiming unlimited power to do what you want.

Edison and Tesla, two of the greatest scientists and inventors in American history, were both businessmen looking for profit and working for large corporations. And much of their work looked beyond immediate applications to whole new fields of technology.

A few years ago, MIT's "Technology Review" wrote about these amazing nifty "quant" investors who used brilliantly-derived equations to predict stock prices, and were cleaning house. Somehow I'm skeptical of the latest incarnation of formulaic investment strategy. Of course it's helpful to look at all the available data about a company, but aren't short-term news analysis tools doomed to unpredictable behavior once more than one person is using them?

By the way, without getting into the rants above, the people criticizing "the free market" above ought to read about the Community Re-Investment Act (which forced banks to make bad loans) and the federally-created banks (which existed to promote house sales beyond what a free market would justify). As recently as a few years ago, Angelo Mozillo of Countrywide Financial (and of the "Friends of Angelo" in Congress) publicly told his colleagues they should ignore their own financial risk analysis, ie. rational self-interest, in favor of altruism towards the poor. There's room for regulation, but what we've got is not a free market. There's massive government regulation existing to manipulate the market and reward failure, rather than to just curb the most dangerous and useless behavior.

How can we plausibly restrict the sale of malware if the seller can point to the smoke shops for comparison? Seems like they only have to wink and say "don't tell us you plan to do anything illegal with it".

Well, it's like what we hear out of China. "The Chinese people don't want the freedom to look at dissenting political opinions. That's why there needs to be a massive censorship filter and widespread intimidation and oppression to stop any specific Chinese people who disagree." If there were really a consensus, there'd be no need for such a law.