Definitely RTCW. Best online game I've played bar none - I got hooked into it for about a month solid. Sadly when I went back after several more months, it'd pretty much died. I've not found anything to come close to the gameplay (well, except Battlefield 2) and the way you get teamwork even from random folks on a public server.

Bad metaphor. You don't automatically buy anything by seeing an ad.

A better metaphor is going into a museum or similar tourist attraction (cathedral, art gallery, etc) and NOT putting any money in the donations box. It's not illegal, and it's not even going to get you kicked out, but it's rude, disrespectful, and will show up just what sort of person you are.

Funny when one looks at the statistics, but being that so many, many more people die of preventable car accidents and of heart attacks from eating too much junk food, why is it that the same expenditures aren't lavished on those areas?

You go on to say that it's based around the government's desire for "authority" but I don't think this is true - the government is not incompetent or evil enough for this.

I think people are genuinely more fearful of being knifed in the street, intimidated by threatening teenagers, and suffering burglaries, etc, than they are of dying of being obese or in a car crash. You're more likely to die of a heart attack or a car crash than getting knifed by an unruly mob, but it's the fears and desires of the populace that drives policies, not logic or statistics.

I am a big fan of CCTV and the like, but I have more immediate fear for the security of my family on the streets than I do for their health thirty years down the line (sure, I care about that too, but it's not such an immediate "we must do something" type threat).

This picture of Woz practicing doesn't show him as being particularly large. You get +100 virtual karma points from me for that Fantasia reference though.

In the original UK show (that Dancing With The Stars is derived from) last year, "Strictly Come Dancing", they had a rather old and none-too-thin political correspondent called John Sergeant on the show. No idea why, but the reaction to it was a bit of a surprise.. more people tuned in, and people really got behind the guy even though his dancing wasn't too good.

He got through week after week just because of the overwhelming number of public votes. I guess people really love a cute (old) underdog. And.. so perhaps it'll go with Woz. People like to see regular joes (as much as Woz is a regular joe) rather than glossy celebs all the time. Perhaps Woz will resonate with America the way John did with us.

(John eventually quit the show because he thought he was taking the attention away from those who could actually dance well each week.)

As these techniques improve and become more popular, it makes me wonder what music produced twenty or fifty years from now will sound like, and how much authenticity will be left.

Are you serious? Is hip-hop and R&B the only form of music? Most modern folk, rock, and classical recordings have far more fidelity (thus more authentic to the original sound of performance) than those made twenty or fifty years ago.

Someone defecating or urinating is usually totally nonsexual too, but we shouldn't be allowed to put pictures of it up on Facebook if it contravenes their rules.

So this is why Mac users have such larger brains than Windows users!

.. British Navy submarine captains are the only officers worldwide (as of the mid 90s or so) to have the independent right to launch nuclear missiles if they lose contact with the Admiralty.

(300 light years / 1000 miles) * 2 inches == 89 588 337.2 kilometers

So (assuming an average moth is about 2 inches in size) it could make out a planet of about 90 million km (some 64 times wider than Sol) in diameter in front of a star that's 300 light years away, right?

The site seems to be using some sort of Flash animation to process the payments and it's not on an SSL / HTTPS URL. At least, not in the usual sense. It says data is sent using SSL in the Flash animation itself, but there's no padlock in the browser, etc.. so no guarantee it really is using SSL.

(For what it's worth, I ran netstat to check it is using SSL, and it appears to be. But does Joe Public know that when they're told to look out for the padlock icon?)

The UK has significantly less fatalities from road traffic accidents compared to most Western countries.

Further, the government says only 3% of road deaths are a direct result of speeding.. so no.. not "a large part" at all.

Running Crysis at 800 x 600 with the lowest quality settings, an eight-core Core i7 system managed an average frame rate of 7.36fps, compared with 5.17fps from Intel's DirectX 10 integrated graphics.

This is easy to laugh at (and many Slashdotters have done so above) but this move shows Microsoft is seriously looking at the future, and not in a "we need a new Windows that'll actually make some money" kinda way.

Running an 8 core machine just to do CPU based graphics rendering is currently impractical and stupid. But in 5 or 10 years? 8->64 core machines will probably the norm and we'll have more CPU power than we know what to do with (we already do for most users in terms of general processing), so there'll be room for this concept.

The day of many separate pieces of hardware is going to be up sometime in the future, and this is a great step at planning for it. Once you have, say, 100 cores, why not devote a handful to graphics, one to networking, one to IO control.. and effectively have "software as hardware"? Why have a dedicated graphics card *if* the CPU power, technology and bandwidth is there to deal with it in future? At least MS are thinking about something that could be useful 5 years down the line..