Safety is a major concern. You have all kinds of kids and even adults who get so engrossed in the game that all kinds of bad things could happen. Even a casual and aware gamer might have an occasional accident.

Imagine if you were using a real sword, 70cm long or even larger. The potential for damaging your surroundings, or poking another person in the eye is very high.

Perhaps it is something that could work in an arcade or arena where there is dedicated staff to ensure a safe environment, but definitely not for home console use.

Unfortunately, the link you posted doesn't mention the timescale for energy generation. I am under the impression that, like nearly all solar energy technology, that the primary cost is up-front installation, and maintenance costs are virtually zero thereafter. Using this assumption, we have

price / kWh = 2 (billion $) / (280 MW * t)

This gives t = (2 billion hours) / (280e3 * [100 * price in cents/kWh]) as the amount of time it would take to break even, or with some simplification, 81.485 years / P where P is the price in cents / kWh at which you wish to sell.

So if you were to sell at $.07 / kWh, it would ideally take 11.64 years to recoup investment (not taking into account additional costs and possible fluctuation in energy output). At double that price, it will take half the time. Either way, after that, I would say it's free energy. I don't see why there aren't more projects like this.

I'm not a neuroscientist, but I don't think size really has much to do with it. Elephants have the largest brains of all, no? While they're intelligent creatures, they don't compare to humans.

Really, raw intelligence comes from a small portion of the brain, namely the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex, if I recall correctly, and it is this portion of homo sapiens that makes them such an intelligent race (and I think dolphins have one that's even larger). Further, I think more than the raw weight of the brain, it's the number of neurons and more importantly, the quantity of synaptic connections between the neurons which contributes to greater intelligence. While the raw weight of the brain generally correlates with these numbers, and intelligence as a result (which is probably valid for interspecies comparisons, but not intraspecies ones), when you make finer comparisons between intelligence, it actually turns out that having fewer neurons makes you more intelligent because your brain has pruned those neurons which are found not to be performing as much activity, leaving more space/other resources for more productive neurons to grow.

To reiterate, I'm not an expert in this area, but these are my general understandings, any of which may be off.

The funny thing about crime is that it's determined by those who have the power.

Ethical considerations are an entirely different and more appropriate discussion.

Yes, but one difference in this situation is how children could be/are encouraged to do this.

Seconded. Summaries are infinitely more informative than images. Images don't tell the story - words do. Do people really need to see a picture of Edward Snowden or a Kindle to better understand the article? No, they do not by any means.

Just generally speaking, are you guys even asking why you need to make these changes before you do them? How do you think they possibly help the site? In /.'s 15+ years of operation, have you not figured out the formula yet? Your audience is unique, and your website is too. Don't just turn /. into a generic site - there's plenty of other ones just like that. Keep it like it is guys, it's not broken, don't try to fix it.

Yes, but they would probably like Electrons and math the least!

Perhaps the physical effects are not deadly, but consider the economic ones. Heroin isn't cheap and it's addictive. What are users going to do when they run out of money? Krokodil exists because it's cheap enough that once you're hooked, you'll take what you can get. Also factor in that many of the users often don't have a stable source of income and you can see that they'll resort to drastic means to obtain it, including those which involve a gun.

I'm all for safe use of harmless drugs like marijuana if they can be controlled, but after watching this video (credit due to someone else's post in the comments), I think the economic impact of legitimizing the use of an addicting drug like heroin would be severe, if not fatal.

You're right, they're certainly not equal, but you got it completely backwards. Child abuse is a mere inconvenience inflicted on meaningless mortals who in all honesty have minimal worth in this world. Piracy is the amoral disrespect and deprivation of the innate, God-given wealth of our Supreme ruling elite and should be considered the real and most fundamental crime against the entire human race. If anything, Google should have moved to block piracy long before child abuse and other merely pedestrian crimes.

At least that's how the media cartels would portray it.

Right, the law is the highest source of moral authority... keep thinking that one. Or should we invoke Godwin to disprove this one?

The only result that this will have is either

1.) derivative products adding it back in or
2.) users moving to a different platform

Wake up idiots!!! Do you see how many forks of your project exist these days? That's because they have no other means to fix your broken products. Gnome is becoming un-recommendable as a desktop for all their idiotic design decisions. From now on, your options are KDE if you want a qt-based setup or Xfce/LXDE if you want gtk. Gnome no longer exists to me.

Sure, it's always anecdotal. Honestly, I always hesitate wading into argments such as these as the evidence is pretty much always anecdotal or crappy science at best and ultimately prove largely useless.

I don't think I've ever tried max out on memory, but sure the system will grind to a halt once you start swapping. That's true of any system, but at least on Linux (contrary to Windows AFAIK) you have to at least consume all the memory first. Probaby the last time i ever came close to doing that was when I was trying to run too many VMs with a solitary 1GB RAM (merely a year ago, I have upgraded since and haven't looked back at all). But with disk IO in general, Windows always gags even when there's plenty of memory to spare while Linux breezes by. Case in point, I was just reverting from backups 30 minutes ago while updating my system at the same time. I wasn't able to watch videos on my external drive, and VLC, firefox, etc. took a while to load, so the limits are there. But I was at least able to still move windows around, which is far more than I would expect of Windows, which grinds to a halt just when I try to start Firefox from a fresh boot. Again, it's all anecdotal of course, but I'm sure there's some kind of scientific reason why Windows just completely gags when performing a bit of disk IO.

But on the graphics front, I completely agree, and think some fundamental changes are going to have to occur somewhere to bring Linux into the modern age. I'm not an expert on the graphics stack or Xorg, but I don't think things are going to improve in their current state. Of course, vendors protecting their precious proprietary ideas (NSFW) doesn't help the situation at all either.

You're right on 3, but

1) Many applications run faster on Ubuntu (and Linux in general), Steam for example. I've noticed Linux on my personal machine to be much faster than the Windows machines I've had to fix.
2) I've consistently seen Windows gag on many routine operations. I/O responsiveness on Linux is far more robust than on Windows. Flash causes the entire system to grind to a halt on Windows whereas Linux is still responsive enough to execute a killall plugin-container. Libreoffice on Linux just loads, whereas on Windows it causes the system to hang for several seconds while the libraries are loaded.
4) You may be right on this one as well, but Linux has several APIs and toolkits for all sorts of things - window toolkits, networking, and so on.... The only area where you're probably right on this one is stability in the graphics space.

Don't get me wrong, I doubt that desktop GNU/Linux will ever dominate the marketplace, but it's definitely not because of the technical merits of either platform - Linux is lightyears ahead of Windows, and always will be. Linux developers focus on making a good product; Microsoft is more of a marketing/legal company in the tech industry (a la Apple, Oracle), and they focus more of their efforts on licensing, lock-in/out, and general marketing than developing their core product. People don't have to choose Windows (from a technical standpoint) generally don't but Microsoft rarely gives them a choice.