...due to a sporting event.

In the United States, sporting events are often associated with violent riots, as well, though with lower death tolls. Europe is well known for its soccer hooligans.

Ever hear of 80 people being killed following a LAN event? Any riots at GenCon or E3?

Didn't think so.

If this guy was sincere, he'd be proposing a 1% tax on sports equipment, sales of licensed sports franchise clothing, etc, and using the money to fund children's hospitals which treat the many crippling (and sometimes fatal) injuries that occur from childhood sports. (Check out the average number of high school students killed in school shootings each year, and the average number of high school students killed in school sports.)

Of course, he's not sincere. "Sincerity" is an alien concept to such as he. He's a vile, contemptible, parasitic piece of verminous scum who exploits fear and ignorance in order to gain power. He is a creature without any personal worth, a loathsome leech who feeds off the misery and pain of others, and grows fat and happy on their suffering. Or, in other words, a politician. Even among that repugnant crew of amoral reprobates, though, people like Fourkiller represent the scrapings of the bottom of a barrel that is, itself, filled with the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel.

Because.... because SCIENCE, that's why! They're tampering in God's domain! There are things man was not meant to know! If it's not 100% safe, it's 100% dangerous, like fire! Fire bad!

Get with the program, will you?

They've been doing this on shows like CSI and NCIS for years. :) You mean... they were just making it up? Wow. My faith in Hollywood's technical advisers is shattered forever.

The handful of people defending this idiocy choose two tactics: "Well, this is a New Global Age" and "Hey, why are you all so close minded? Remember, they laughed at continental drift!" Let's look at those defenses.

The idea that this would help people who travel a lot, or people who do a lot of global business, is bollocks, because it removes all information content from time. Right now, "12:00 PM" conveys meaning -- it means, for most people, "around lunchtime". If it's 12:00 everywhere on Earth at once, that meaning is lost. This proposal MAKES THINGS WORSE. IT REDUCES INFORMATION CONTENT. Human biology will not change; we've evolved to a particular timescale and we're happier, healthier, and more productive when we stick to it -- though of course individuals vary. (And if it turns out that a slightly mutant internal clock leads to you producing more children, over time, the internal clocks of our whole species might change... but just because you make a fortune in currency trading because you're sharpest at 4 AM doesn't imply you'll have more kids, as wealth tends to negatively correlate with offspring in industrial nations, but I digress.)

So, the idea that "If it's 6:00 here, it's 6:00 everywhere!" is somehow useful or helpful for the New Global Era is absolute and utter drivel, because it forces you to remember what's happening at "6:00" in any part of the world. In London, do people eat lunch at 6:00, or leave work, or are they sound asleep? In Hong Kong, is 6:00 breakfast time, the start of the work day, or rush hour? It's very easy for a computer to add/subtract hours automatically, so you can schedule things to your time and other people see it at theirs; it's harder for a computer to deal with abstractions like "It's around lunchish", without having to be programmed with something that ties activity periods to GPS systems. We could have Clippy come up and say, "You're scheduling a meeting with the Hong Kong office for 3:00 PM, which is when they're going to be home with their families. Would you like to reschedule? Y/N"

Remember, folks: The reason we remember the wacky, far-out ideas that everyone laughed at but which turned out to be brilliant is because they're the extreme minority -- we report on planes that crash, not ones that land safely. Most of the wacky, far-out ideas that everyone laughed at.... deserved to be laughed at. Being "outside the box" is not the same as being RIGHT, and most of the time, the box is there because no one's found a USEFUL idea outside of it.

Which is easier?

"Hey, it looks like it's 2 AM in London.... I'd better not call, he's probably asleep." -- this is our current system, and finding out "If it's X here, it's Y there" is about as easy as it can get.

OR

"OK, it's 3 PM here, which means it's mid-afternoon.... but what's 3 PM in London? Oh, in London, 3 PM is the middle of the night."

It's a lot easier when you can say "It's X time in Y location, and humans usually do Z at X time", then it is to remember that people on the East Coast eat lunch at 3:OO PM Universal Time, and people on the West Coast eat lunch at 11:00 AM universal time. My scheduling, etc, programs already automatically adjust events such as meetings to my local time -- if I see a phone meeting scheduled for 5:30 PM, then it's 5:30 PM *my time*, even though the person who entered it, in California, entered it as "2:30 PM".

The more I think on this, the more likely it is this is some kind of social experiment to see how people react when presented with a self-evidently bollocks idea on a site which is otherwise generally reputable and filtered.

Bah. There's an app for that.

"The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, every century but this, and every country but his own. He never shall be missed! No he never shall be missed."

(Yeah, I'm altering the quote slightly to complete the verse. Ask me if I care.)

Or, in other words, stop trying to impress people by being oh-so-cool and holier-than-thou. I'm surprised no one's bothered posting something like "Why are we celebrating space travel when it wasted BILLIONS of DOLLARS when there were people STARVING and there was SLAUGHTER in Vietnam and how can ANYONE be proud of ANYTHING America does when we're still KILLING BABY DUCKS with our IMPERALIST SPY DRONES?!?!?!?!?!" (For best effect, you must read this while choking back tears because you just can't stand the inhumanity of it all and your rage at how no one CARES. At least not as much as you.)

Sure it'll be posted soon, however.

On, in other other words.... dude, chill. But if you'd rather celebrate the engineers responsible for the space race, we can all sing the praises of Wernher Von Braun. Has he learned Chinese yet?

I've been seeing previews of your new "World of Warcraft" game, and I think you're wasting the rumored 50 million dollars you've put into it. It's nothing but a clone of the market leader, Everquest, and there's really no way you can overcome the huge advantage EQ has on you in terms of subscriber base and development time. They've had over five years to constantly refine and improve the game experience; you'll be starting out where they were five years ago, and doing nothing but playing catch-up. You've got the same "Go kill 10 rats" gameplay and the same endgame, except you have almost no raid content ready and I hear that your "innovative" PVP system, using the same "instancing" technology that Everquest implemented years ago in their Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion, will not be ready at launch. Only something totally new and radical will work -- have you considered making it over into a twitch-based FPS game? Just doing what's already proven to be popular and genre defining, but doing it better, cleaner, sharper, and faster, is no recipe for success. Originality is far more important than competence, and building on your competitors work and taking advatnage of all they've learned the hard way, and then bettering it, is no recipe for success. Only the totally new and totally unproven, especially if it's not what customers have previously demonstrated they're willing to pay for, will win the game. You may want to look at Tabula Rasa, which has been in development since 2001 and will probably release soon. It's so original and groundbreaking even the developers aren't entirely sure what kind of game they're making -- that kind of shattering of genre boundaries is the best way to have a mega-hit. I feel sorry for the developers, artists, and so on who will be laid off when World of Warcraft bombs, dismissed as just another Everquest clone in a field already crowded with them (Asheron's Call, Dark Age Of Camelot, Horizons, etc).

Obviously, I'm very dull.

Fictional game writing, for D&D, Pathfinder, et al. Formatting for such things is often complex and editors are crotchety.

Fetishizing (sp?) the "simplicity" of your tools is every bit as much an act of narcissism as bragging about the ten million bells and whistles on your new HAL-compliant AI Write-Buddy TM that automatically scans TVTropes.org after each sentence to make sure your cliche factor is under 3.5 millilyttons per chapter. (Exact limit can be set via the user, of course, via a series of 16 nested dialog boxes).

Dude. Write. Or don't write. Just don't write about the tool you use for writing; it's about as dull as possible.

I've used manual typewriters, TRS-80s, WordStar 1.0, Appleworks, Microsoft Word, a zillion other things, and I have seen almost no difference in my writing speed, which is a pretty steady 500 to 1000 words per hour, depending on what I'm writing. (Fiction, usually, >1000... it's easy, the limit is my finger speed. Game writing, towards the lower end, because I have to check rules, do some math, look up references to see the proper formatting of a skill or a feat or a monster, etc.).

Which is better?
To find new and amazing ways, etc, now. Like, duh.

There's so much wrong with your post I have no idea where to begin. First, cultures aren't designed -- they evolve. Second, "strict rules and provisioning", in the real world, mean the Commissars dine on caviar and the peasants starve. Everyone who advocates such systems tends to see themselves as a Commissar-to-be, of course. THEY know what the peasants "should" and "shouldn't" want, what the peasants "need", and if they have a small amount of extra luxuries compared to said peasants, why, it's perfectly acceptable given the hard work they do keeping the poor dears from killing themselves. Third, ever hear the expression "The only thing more common than hydrogen is stupidity"? Yeah. I think we have proof that is true.

Your doomsday scenario has happened many times in the past, and it follows the same pattern -- vital resource begins to run low, the professional doomsayers and people who think the world would be perfect if only THEY were in charge of it begin squawking, and, meanwhile, as the cost of the old resource goes up, the value of finding a replacement does as well, lots and lots of people try to find a replacement, eventually someone does, and the doomsayers march sullenly back to their caves. The only times this fails to happen is when people are foolish enough to LISTEN to the doomsayers.

Why is it "Activism" and "Community Organizing" when The People We Like do it, but "Propaganda" and "Astroturfing" when The People We Don't Like do it?

It doesn't?

Rentals, no, because car rentals are a luxury item, while game rentals are not -- this is because the way people use cars is, oddly, different from how they use games -- but used car sales are a very good indicator of how much people are willing to pay for a new car.

You might also wish to consider that a used car is generally not as good as a new one, due to mechanical wear and tear, while a used game -- assuming the CD/DVD isn't scratched or damaged -- is every bit as good as the same game bought new at a store. So there's another factor there. (I tend to only buy hardbacks used, not paperbacks, because most used paperbacks are about to fall apart and aren't worth even the reduced price, while most used hardbacks will survive several readings. Not all used goods are equivalent to new goods; games and media CD/DVDs are, while cars and analog media like cassettes and VHS tapes degrade rapidly with use. Let's use meaningful comparisons, shall we?)