Oh, you play EVE too?

I would, but I have an especial interest in infinite game worlds. I'm finally getting around to "Dear Esther" which is not infinite, but the aim of the game is to travel and experience the game's narrative. I've always liked exploring game environments for the sake of appreciating the virtual world. Grand Theft Auto Vice City and games like Midtown Madness and Test Drive remain favorites for that reason. I wouldn't even call the activity meta gaming as I might for my activities in EVE Online where I enjoy exploring deep space most. I would be interesting in exploring a PG infinite world providing the world was immersive. Skyrim with all the high res water and flora mods is beautiful to explore and take in. Something has to happen though, and for me it has to be more than just a random encounter. It would be fun to explore an infinite map in Skyrim and happen upon something unique and cool, like say a UFO crash site a la Fallout. I have to wonder if game like that could be made by anyone other than an indie. Who would spend AAA money to develop a game like a GTA Vice City that focuses only on cruising a photorealistic 1986 Miami for what has to be a niche within a niche market of consumers?

I'm not playing word games. I mentioned the Libertarian party losing elections because your last remark about my ignorance of the libertarian movement being irrelevant made me wonder if you were trying to argue that the Libertarian party has had an impact. What do you by "whatever that may be"? I made it pretty clear that the modern libertarian movement consists of people from across the board. You've only restated my points here. I never said that libertarian minded voters don't have an impact, I said that mainstream popular libertarian movement, which has been defined by the Tea Party, should not be listened to, and I am correct. So far, they (the Tea Party) have been an embarrassment. They constantly show that they haven't put much out int their beliefs and they are mostly a reactionary element that has no real direction. yes, of course, there are other kinds of libertarians, and I pointed that out already. If you weren't so fast to foe me, you might have noticed that we don't disagree with each other on those points, instead you kept in with assumptions.

Take a break from slapping bumper stickers on your car and look at what I wrote. Where did I imply that either of the major parties are automatically run by saints or scholars or intellectuals? If you require citations that show that the Tea Party libertarian movement is compromised mostly of self-described political amateurs who only recently took an interest in politics, pick your favorite cable news network and watch one of their documentaries on them. With the exception of MSNBC's tendency to underplay the role of socially liberal pro-legalization voters and overplay the input of super-rich svengalies, the three cable nets have been virtually identical in pointing out that the Tea Party movement is a populist movement of outsiders. Also, nowhere do I say that the libertarian movement is irrelevant. You might have read into my calling the Libertarian party inconsequential. If you think they aren't, count their successes at swaying ideology or just winning major elections. What I did say is that there is little value in what the Tea Party stands for when you pin them down to specifics, and I stand by that.

Calm down everyone. You're all confusing three distinct phenomena: classic libertarianism, an inconsequential modern political third party, and the contemporary mainstream Randian wannabe sociopolitical movement of the same name that at best is nothing more than a reactionary coalition of political, social, and civic amateurs, some of which are actual liberal pro-legalization college kids that think they are brilliant scholars because they got an A in poli-sci and soc, and in-fact sociopolitical conservative moralists that are anti-tax because they either fear their money going to welfare or are borderline confederacy-seeking states rightists that want a Fed so small they can drown it in a bathtub. Add in a dash of actual anarcho-capitalist industrialists and entrepreneurs and crazed gold standard pushers of alternative currencies for flavor. By and large, the libertarian movement as it is popularized today is a caricature of the original libertarian movement, but populated by low information people that don't read enough, that get all their news from pundits, and who only recently in the last 8 years have taken a real interest in domestic policy and macroeconomics. To put it simply, they don't know what they don't know.

To put it another way, I have recently in the last decade taken a refreshed interest in physics after sleep walking through it as a student and a professional. But, much of my new learning comes from advocacy sources like Michio Kaku. I enjoy doing fun things with magnets and lasers. My teleportation machine is awesome, but I assure you, none of you should use it no matter how much I tell you I've worked out all the kinks because I'm a physics tourist and my input should be taken as if it came from an enthusiastic child that still believes in Santa.

There's no reason to worry here. This article is not news. Of course Apple is looking at alternatives to Intel. Apple is always looking at alternatives. It's part of the company's culture and plan for for evolving. Apple didn't just switch from PowerPC. A decision that big made that fast can be disastrous to a hardware company. Apple long had an Intel based Macintosh back when there wasn't public talk about IBM and Motorola not delivering the clock speeds. Assuredly, Apple has an ARM Macintosh right now. Apple very likely has another PowerPC Mac too. I'm worried too about Macintosh becoming iOS but I have more faith in Apple that this won't happen.

The kid in me is fascinated with living forever as an ever-evolving robot, much like Ray Kurzweil hopes. I want to believe that the universe is ever-expanding and that I will be able to witness the birth of stars; that someday, an advanced AI me (and indeed us all) will see an amazing future for humans and meet new races, or maybe just travel the world doing all the things I've wanted to do. It's a silly dream - I realize this, but then even learning that Gliese 581 g is too far away to ever reach within a generation, also made me sad. But, I suppose on the the upside, it's good that I can still romanticize space travel as bitter as I can get about everything else!

Be prepared to be confused by your TV Guide half of the year. And remember, certain parts of Arizona do observe, so be careful about driving near or through certain reservations when it comes time to change your clock, or you'll drive into a slidecage and be unable to return home.

I miss the days when I got real installation media and driver disks that contained drivers for other operating systems I didn't even have, and I hated the 90's era of recovery discs that factory restored all that bloatware I deleted immediately, but Apple's way of handling media-free installation has made me a convert. I ruined my partition on my Macintosh. I booted, and when the computer couldn't find any usable partitions, it connected online and downloaded enough to make the machine bootable, and from there, downloaded the rest of the OS and installed. Of course, I saved the installation files to a new recovery partition as well as a USB and FireWire portable drive. I even have an emergency file system on a FireWire drive in case my internal drive ever dies. This is a smarter way of doing things. My worst case scenario is having no connection and no access to my backup drives. The fact is, people lose their installation discs all the time and the only option has been paying for replacement discs or hunting down files online on some horrible support site.

If installation media were ever to return, I hope it will be exclusively in the form of rewritable flash memory. I'll be blunt, read-only optical media is shit and has always been shit. If I buy boxed software, put it on flash media so I can transfer the contents to my larger mass storage and then reuse the flash drive like I did floppy diskettes.

Microsoft is marketing the Surface as something more than a tablet. It is a hybrid of tablet and ultra book, hence it is made for people like myself who really need more than what a tablet can do (I have an iPad) but don't really want to se a laptop unless I just happen to want to. This is why the keyboard cover is so much a part of the Surface "experience".

Because no third party app that translates Office formats or opens them does so with complete accuracy. If you depend on the more advanced features of MS Office (things other than text processing), then anything less than the real MS Office is a frustrating compromise.

Hmm. Does this mean Princess Leia is now a Disney princess?

Are you sure about that? William Shatner didn't want to do the convention thing initially, but after he experienced one, he was very happy, and he seems to really love his fans. It was my understanding that for a while Patrick Steward really resented that he was most associated with Star Trek despite his film and stage roles. In any case, love Patrick Steward.

Only Kirk could survive death by snu snu.

He had the calm authority, but there was also a fiery rage inside him.