I had no idea there was a single voting day in the US. In Sweden we have weeks to vote, even though the votes are counted on a single day. Make it several days at least so the people can take their time to vote.

Add all of Scandivia to the list of places that doesn't need, get or want dubs. I'm sure there are many more as well. The few dubs I have had the displeasure of watching have been of children's movies, and it cannot be expressed how horrible the dubbing was.

Besides, if the film has to be translated to the native language, why worry about piracy of a non-translated version?

Agreed. I used to be a PC only gamer (engineer, computer geek etc bla bla..) but since I got a PS3 I'm totally sold on consoles. Easy to use, comfortable to play from my couch, in general a better experience as a whole for me. It also fits nicely with my home theater system.

Sure, the PC can do all those things, but not as easily and would require more maintenance and configuration. Especially getting wireless controllers set up to work well with each game.

While I don't know the details, I do know that a good chunk if not all of the cost is paid by the mining companies. Either way if tax money is being used that money is easily recouped in the form of taxes from the mining operation.

I do see your point and I'm not surprised, I guess in Russia neither the mining company nor the government would pay for an operation like this, screwing over the local residents.

There are a few places in Sweden where entire towns are in the process of being gradually moved due to the expansion of neighboring mines. The thing is, these towns were built _because_ of those mines in the first place, generations ago. The citizens don't mind, they actually support it, since they know their towns would become ghost towns without the mines.

That being said, from the sound of things this town should have undergone similar procedures a long time ago. But there is more than one side to this type of situation.

Well said. And since there is already a sensor on the brake pedal for turning off the cruise control, it should just be a matter of programming to make it happen.

Yes. These solutions can be pretty damn good if they are high quality and well balanced. They are normally used where there is no room for floor speakers or floor speakers are not wanted for aesthetic reasons.

Then there's the problem of shadowing/shading you pointed out. In a pure ray tracer, everything has that unnatural shiny/bright look. This is because you trace rays from the screen back to the light source. Works fine for direct illumination but the real world has lots of indirect illumination that gives the richness of shadows we see. For that you need something else like radiosity or photon mapping, and that has different costs.

Forgive my ignorance, but I don't quite understand why ray tracing can't handle indirect illumination. Wouldn't the traced ray modify the intensity and color of the (eventually found) light source with each bounce? Or is the problem that when you cast one ray per pixel you only get the contribution from a single light source in the end?

Well, considering that the critical mass of pure plutonium-239 is about 10kg, I would say the risk of 8g of thorium going critical is fairly small. That's not to say I believe this will ever work though.

The quoted statement doesn't make sense either. Subcritical only means that there is no self-sustaining nuclear reaction, not that there are no reactions taking place. I haven't RTFA but it sounds like whoever wrote it didn't understand what was going on.

This feature alone makes it way better than facebook for me. It's so easy to send messages only to close friends, or colleagues, etc. And I can easily choose to only view messages from specific groups as well. With facebook it always feels like everything you write or do is visible to everyone. And everything someone else does is visible to me, which is not optimal either.

Yep, same here. I pay a high price for premium channels and yet I can't see much of what I want to see. And when / if they finally do air it here, it's not in HD. While I can get an HD version of it the same day it airs in the US. A case of the pirated alternative being a better product. I still keep paying for the channels though, even if I rarely use them. Maybe I shouldn't though (the whole "vote with your wallet" thing).

Do you need consent in a public location? Honest question, I'm not from the US. In Sweden you can film, record audio and take as many pictures as you like in any public place including inside buildings.

When the limit is reached, there will still be coin to be made from mining (though it wouldn't really be mining) from transaction fees. When mining become prohibitively expensive people will stop mining, which will decrease the difficulty and make it (slightly) profitable again. Either that or people don't stop mining and operate at a loss. Neither scenario has any impact on the usability of bitcoin.

Yup, agreed. Doesn't mean it doesn't have a future though. Might not be likely, but not impossible either.