this chart indicates literacy hasn't changed that much in the 1900s, and this article suggests it's gotten worse among military applicants. The statistics are based on people who were not allowed to enlist due to lack of basic reading skills. You need to read a lot of notices, manuals, written orders, etc in the military. Believe it or not, some people (I believe most) join because they want to *serve*, not because it's the best they can do financially.

I am not a veteran, but I know many and I respect them and it bothers me when they are characterized as being stupid or greedy, when in my experience they are intelligent and generous.

Given the context of this discussion, is it necessarily a bad thing not to automatically accept as fact anything called "science"?

You mean the DVD section for Jurassic Park? Birds are not dinosaurs. There is a theory that birds are descended from dinosaurs, but not all scientists agree with that.

That's the crux of it right there - where is the burden of proof? To the atheist, it's obviously up to God to prove himself. If they can come up with plausible theories that don't involve God, then God doesn't exist. To the believer, it's obvious that the atheist has to disprove God, not just come up with a plausible alternative. In my experience, most people in both groups think they've won the argument and can't understand why the other side is so stupid.

The article is in the Scotland Herald, so I assume it's about how some crazy Americans believe in their Nessie. Of course, no true Scotsman would doubt Nessie's existence.

Anyone can create and copyright their creation. Where's the inequality?

So you're saying ownership will be replaced by pwnership?

Before anyone gets to too proud or offended, notice that the whole scale only ranges from 98 to 102. That's not much of a difference, is it? Even if we ignore all the problems with method, the results point to a surprising degree of uniformity, don't they?

It mentions that the scale of these things is 150nm, which sounds pretty large compared to modern cpu features. Still, it's a very interesting development.

Thank you for your sane, relevant post in this sea of thoughtless religion bashing. I'm a believer in God and a fan of technology, so while I like reading the information and *some* of the comments on this site, the bigoted stereotyping wears on me. I was going to mod you up, but you're already at 5.

I agree those are all advantages to Linux, but in practice I doubt they will make much difference to average frames per second (that's the performance metric I'm interested in). If you're running a graphics intensive game, the scheduler won't matter, because you probably aren't running much else. The amount of RAM won't matter (as long as you have enough that it isn't swapping to disk, I don't think performance scales much with available memory). The file system won't matter except when loading levels, and networking isn't generally a bottleneck. Faster level loads and better ping are a definite plus, but I suspect the difference is marginal. The main thing in software affecting FPS is the rendering code, and I *suspect* they're using the same direct3d to OpenGL library that they used for their OSX ports

The steam platform itself and Valve's source engine games will be available on Linux (I assume that means linux native ports), and no source engine games have DRM other than Steam, that I'm aware of. I imagine this will be like their ports for Mac in that only some titles run on mac, and I don't know how mac users can tell which titles they can play other than to read the system requirements. The nice thing is you just buy the game and it knows which version to download AND you then own it on whatever platform you want to use. You can download it onto multiple machines, you just can't be logged into the same steam account on multiple machines at once.

One thing *I'm* curious about - will the Linux games run as well in Linux as Windows on the same hardware? My guess would be no, since they've added a compatibility layer that translates direct3d calls to OpenGL, but I'm curious how close it is. When they ported the Games to Mac I looked for some performance comparisons between the mac and windows versions and couldn't find anything.

So Sturgeon was the first slashdotter?

Arguably, wind and tide are other forms of solar energy. You say of solar-thermal "just heat a working fluid so that it pushes a turbine". That's a good description of wind power.