Not only is it a two-stroke engine, which are inherently more efficient than four-stroke engines, but it also limits the moving parts to a minimum. And Lotus never boasts about something it cannot do. However, I'd like to see a multicylinder version of it.

And that's no mean feature when you see the number of moving parts in today's engines fitted with variable valve timing/lift systems (which, of course, the switch to electric propulsion will avoid altogether).

The question is, however, is it too late? And imho, there is a "yes" and a "no".

Yes, the electric motors have been long proven to work.

No, the weight/energy ratio of electricity sucks. No, other (really!) "CO2 clean" fuels already exist, with engines already able to run on them (this particular engine included).

The future looks promising anyway. Now, I just wish that the car manufacturers turned more effort into removing weight. Even if that means stepping back on safety features - after all, nothing has been done yet on the driver training front.

The look and feel of Microsoft Office is horrible, while that of OpenOffice is standard, familiar, unobtrusive and very functional. It outweights that of Microsoft Office by (hudreds of) miles.

See how that works? Opinions are like haemorrhoids, every asshole has them.

I use both. I have to use both. I've had to use both for three years. I've had to user PowerPoint vs Impress, Excel vs Calc, to produce workable documents for the Higher People Out There(tm). Can you say the same?

Fact is, I had to resort to MS Office every time I had to produce documents readable, manageable, by upper management. OpenOffice just doesn't cut it.

So please, don't comment unless you have at least some experience on the matter at hand.

Even if it is a joke, this is "man hours" (well, I hope "man minutes" in this case, really) that could have been better spent elsewhere.

For that matter, I don't even see the motivation behind an OOo conference at all at this stage (of the software and community around it). From my point of view, OOo is shipped with the vast majority of user oriented distributions for lack of a better choice, and while I praise Sun for the initial effort, the time has long come since they should have let the child (OOo) loose and adorn it with better clothing (a better license), so that others can take over its education (growth). Even if it means slashing it to pieces (rendering engine, user interface).

the OpenOffice "effort" split into the (clumsy) user interface and (not that good) underlying render library? And make the whole thing available in a more free license?

Instead of coming up with such an ergonomical disaster?

While I resent using Microsoft Office because of its sheer cost (its business model being but a nail in the coffin), I have to admit that the look and feel of the Great Evil(tm) outweighs that of OpenOffice by (hundreds of) miles. Such a pointless effort from the OO staff just makes me wonder whether Sun (or is that Oracle?) just want to ditch OpenOffice altogether. Well, fine, but they could just ditch it by dropping support for it and changing its license so that a real, motivated community take it over and make something really useful out of it.

* you want lots of RAM (high buffer cache);
* you want a CPU with good cpufreq support (any ACPI-compliant CPU will do);
* you want SSD (yes, they're expensive, but the cost of a simple seek is far less than rotating platter disks, and in case your machine just wakes up, SSD has close to zero seek time);
* you want a kernel compiled with "ondemand" CPU frequency governor as the default;
* you DO NOT want "drowsy ACPI states" (sure, it saves power, but you want to SSH in: if the machine's not there, what's the point? WOL won't help, that's my experience with it - either the machine is constantly up or it's down long enough before it answers that it turns out highly frustrating);
* you want a hardware router in front of your machine, with packet filtering ability (this router will do preliminary packet filtering before said packets even reach your machine - and see above).

This is not a hack, this is incompetence from the guys who sold that in the first place.

Are all Time Warner employees marketers or something?

At the same time, correct spelling becomes a distant notion for teens, and "IRC speak" prevalent.

And this is not unique to the US.

Dumb start, but...+1.

However, my concern is over Diablo 3, not WoW, which I don't (want to, for that matter) play.

I am a huge fan of d2x. I've been playing it for ages. But I found out, especially in the latest patches, that unless you had top notch equipment, which is very hard (TOO HARD) to come across in a legit way, you just couldn't beat hell difficulty in single player.

I HATE battle.net. I hated it because of cheaters (but the "diabolic" extension helped me kick them out, fortunately), I hated it because of Blizzard's stance over bnetd, but I hated it even more with the latest patches for the following reasons:

* some epic monsters only showed up online,
* some epic items only could be spawned online as well.

WHY?? Why did Blizzard do that (on all three hatreds)? Has Blizzard learned? That is, will D3 be as interesting "offline" (LANs included) as D1 and D2X (before patch 1.09) were?

I _have_ RTFS. Which is exactly why I asked the question in the first place. RTFQ.

I suppose that if Mr Ralsky has pleaded guilty, he had a good reason... To my non-lawyer eyes, it is because he would have faced a much bigger sanction if he were proved guilty in the end.

Does my reasoning stand, or not at all? In a more general way, are there any quantitative differences in penalties depending upon yours pleading (non) guilty?

Then you may want to "try out" this book:

http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/07/1458232

"Incidentally", it was written by... Stéphane Faroult. I've read it a few times, and used its lessons (there are no other words for it, really) to prove by figures that the redesign of the data model that I suggested could improve the performance by a factor of 10.

Before reading that book, I knew that the data model was broke, but couldn't explain why. This book told me why. We use Oracle, but the lessons taught in this book apply to ANY (R)DBMS.