Seems pretty clear to me.
Is the 6970 twice as fast as a single 4850? If it is, then the 6970 is faster than your 4850 x2. This is ignoring any overhead from making two cards work as one.
You should also consider the feature set. Any 6xxx card will support features that didn't exist when the 4xxx cards were designed.

What would be the point of having options available to tweak if they are unusable?

I think being unique would be fine as long as you are differently unique every time.

Moonlight has kept up with Silverlight in supporting Silverlight on Linux. I'm pretty sure Linux is banned from NetFlix for entirely different reasons.

Seems to me that websites had embedded video long before FLV and HTML5. What was so bad about the pluggins and competition in codecs?

Turbines will run on just about anything that burns.

My last NVIDIA card was a 6800 (not exactly new). Up through this card, NVIDIA's Linux support has been rock solid. I'm always confused when people complain about the lack of open source drivers when the proprietary drivers are so good.

Also the install isn't hard:
Download the installer and run it.
On gentoo (great mythtv support): emerge nvidia-drivers.

60 is too low because most CRTs are happy and look better* at 75 or 85 Hz. I have a 19" that will do 100 Hz at 1280x1024.

* By better I mean less noticeable flicker.

What is the benefit of rendering a frame that cannot be be displayed?

I do not see benefits, but there are clear costs. The extra energy used to render the unused frames is a cost, and the energy used by the A/C to remove the heat from the building is a cost.

You can "Star" locations on the map. The new Navigation application icon takes you to a list of your most recent destinations (or closest, not sure) and has buttons for the Contacts list and the Stared Items list.

This was improved upon. In SC4 if a building became too big for the current demand, it would be replaced with a half broken version of itself. If there was a large surge in demand in that area, it might upgrade itself, but you usually had to bulldoze it yourself.

I would assume that the ability to host a game locally and browse for local servers would take a great deal of effort. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would simply be patched in. Maybe enough people will complain and they'll add it to the two expansions.

Maybe not if one rep is rude, but yes I would definitely leave a service provider if I am met with a rude response from most reps. Don't like Comcast? Switch to Satellite and DSL.

From the bottom of the article with emphasis added:

FB Purity does a pretty good job of keeping these hidden. That way you don't have to keep seeing / hiding them when your friends switch to yet another farm game.