Then there is a growing number of Americans who are prejudiced about blacks/democrats/liberals, take your pick, or have -no idea- about history, politics and governing. In these difficult times of wars and crisis, Obama is one of the best presidents Americans could have hoped for. Better than most of your clueless American public deserves.

Yes, and? What's your point? The US and Germany are allies, it makes sense to share intelligence with allies. What doesn't make as much sense and undermines trust is spying on the administration and institutions of your allies.

This is especially true for Germany, to a lesser extent Spain and France. Not true at all for Italy.
Italians love waving their flag around and displaying it on clothing, almost as much as Americans.

I really like DF and have had quite a few memorable moments in both fortress and adventure mode. But the interface is outrageous. Using three (at least) different sets of keys to scroll through a selection, depending on context, is madenning, especially when starting out. I often wonder how Tarn can have so much talent to create a game like DF while at the same time failing so gloriously at implementing a decent interface.

8 galaxies and 255 stars aren't so impressive if you consider it was generated by procedural generation. Procedural generation can be a very powerful, impressive tool, but in the case of Elite, creating some generic star systems is really not a big deal. If you want to see incredible precedural generation, look at "KKrieger".

What was really impressive was one of the sequels, Frontier: Elite. This game was really ahead of its time, as it contained not just star systems, but real planets you could land on, seamlessly, with cities, some vegetation, atmosphere, clouds... simply amazing. The ability to fly through the depths of space and landing on a realistic planet without a loading screen has been a long time coming since then. The only other game that implements this, as far as I know, is a comparatively recent indie title "Evochron Mercenary"

Rage didn't crash a single time for me, and I didn't have any of the video driver issues some people where complaining about. I remember it being a fantastic, open shooter with some of the best AI and NPC animations I have ever seen, plus entertaining vehicle combat. And it ran fluidly on my old GTX275 card.

Anyway, JC deserves alot of credit for Doom and Quake alone, which were simply mind blowing, earth shattering games at the time.

Oh, you don't have to go all the way to OPEC. The domestic oil industry is influential enough.

This is great news! If the oil industry is pressuring the US gov to wind down involvement in ITER, it probably means that they are beginning to be afraid it might actually yield promising results!

70% of Americans are ready for the next generation of technology!

Actually I have a masters in CS.
But real coding is art, and I have mostly liberal views, so you're not far off.

Wow, I really hate looking at life in purely monetary terms. I didn't really think (much) about money when I decided to go to college. I was looking forward to the life experiences; the learning, the discussions with the professors, the companionship, last but not least, the parties.

It's important to have enough money to get by, beyond that, it's the life experiences that matter, not if your college degree was "worth it" in terms of money lost vs. money gained.

Actually, real incomes (inflation adjusted) in Germany have been almost stagnant in Germany as well, in contrast with other west European countries. Some say this is the reason that has allowed Germany to keep low unemployment and booming economy while the rest of Europe has been moving downward or sideways at best.

I know about the Military-Industrial-Complex. The thing is that, as soon as you mention it, many conservatives will put a label on you "socialist conspiracy nutjob" and move on. It's the truth, but many conservatives have been conditioned to shut off the critical thinking bits in their brains when certain words or phrases appear, which are dangerous to their ideals.

Similar thing with "Bush". If you dare to suggest that the clusterfuck that is going on in Iraq right now is the result of Bush's misguided policies, the conservative brain shuts down and will start ridiculing you about how everything is Bush's fault. If you want to reach out to conservatives you have got to learn how to get across information without using any of these trigger words.

Yes. Your millionaire breeding grounds are popular for those who can afford them, further enforcing the enormous divide between rich and poor that exists in the U.S.

The other 98% get left behind.

World War 2 dragged the U.S. out of recession. Since then, the military and all the ecosystem surrounding it has become a cornerstone of U.S. economy The modern idea is not to win wars, but to have perpetual war. A reason to pump all that tax money into U.S. arms industries, making some people rich and allowing many others to keep their jobs; workers, engineers, managers, contractors, lobbyists.

To enable this "economic system" that puts money into military instead of more productive endeavors or social welfare, you need a constant threat. A constant legitimacy to put money into defense and a patriotic citizenship to go along with it.

Difficulty of running the original game? I suppose perhaps they started their project before the age of Dosbox. I mean, you can even buy the original XCom's on Steam these days.

What would be really nice is if they now started improving on the original. And what would just be incredibly awesome is, if they would merge XCom and Terror From the Deep into one game with both assets, land and sea bases... extreme X-Com awesomeness in a single package.