I'm sure most here have played that online 20 questions game, which used user input to create an impressive database that would guess your item every time. What about using that kind of information as a captcha? Tell the user to do the answering for a predetermined item randomly chosen, and the user will navigate to the correct item via the answers. For instance, the captcha program says "Think of a %s ('bee', for this example) and answer the following questions:

CAPTCHA: Is it alive?
User: Yes
CAPTCHA: Is it bigger than a shoebox?
User: No
CAPTCHA: Does it fly
User: Yes
etc.

Sure, it would take a bit of time on the user's part, but it's fairly entertaining, easy for the end user, time-intensive on a large scale for scammers, and difficult for a computer to answer.

This has long since been discredited, and it's simple to disprove with basic logic. What's to prevent you from mailing an unsealed envelope to yourself? The date will be on it, and then five years later you can stuff it with the details of GE's new holographic television (or whatever), seal it, and voila! You "invented" it five years previous.

That's odd you can't tell the difference. While I speak French on a very rudimentary level, the difference in accents among various French speakers is fairly distinct to me. A couple years back, I saw the Godard film "Out of Breath" and knew within the first few minutes that the woman's French was odd just based on the sound of it (it's mentioned a bit later in the film that she is American).

I'm sure I'd miss out on more subtle varients akin to English as spoken by Texans vs. Alabamans, but gross differences are pretty obvious in my experience.

That's a bit odd. In my time in Paris, about a week also, I'd say it was 50/50. One thing I did notice was that an attempt to speak in French (rudimentary though mine may be - 4 years of high school french 15 years ago) was met with surprised pleasure and a much increased willingness to help, either via French, English, or gesturing and pidgin.

Only a truly stubborn fool gets Rule 11 sanctioned most of the time.

So just how many has Jack Thompson had, then?

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

I agree, this clearly falls under the auspices of the interstate commerce clause, so the federal government should be all over this!

On CPU-bound tasks like transcoding, it scales 1:1. I have a Q6600 overclocked from 2.4 ghz to 3.0 ghz - a 25% bump which is all-but-guaranteed with this chip (even higher overclocks are easily attainable, the Core line overclocks ridiculously well). This results in a 25% reduction in transcode times. Whether this is worth it to you, I suspect, is dependent on how many cpu-limited tasks you do.

We'll just have to agree to disagree. I have a preference to let the market correct itself rather than to throw good money after bad, which in my opinion will just prolong the crisis and delay the recovery. Better a large pain over a short period than a moderate pain over a huge period.

And for those of us who didn't make mistakes? Those who didn't get into ridiculous amounts of debt, or finance houses they couldn't afford? Fair payback for them as well?

Where is this money that the government will give to the corporations coming from?

Ubuntu doesn't ship with VLC, you download it just as you would for Windows. But in Windows, it can decode dvds regardless of whether you have in any other way obtained the mpeg-2 codec. When you download it for Linux, it doesn't work. I know there are patents involved, but why does the Windows version have the ability to play dvds, and why can't that same functionality be carried over to Linux?