I guess I missed where this was an opportunity to spew racist nonsense and score points against "left wing" people.

This is great - more efficient production = lower prices. Ofcourse this isn't the end of capitalism or mankind - in fact it actually is capitalism and mankind at it's best - finding new and better solutions to problems, in order to free up resources for new things and inovations

And with a larger population yet a smaller workforce, who gets to benefit from these lower prices?

There's an 'interesting' economic problem and endgame in full automation too, most humans aren't 'earning' [except the ones twiddling the robotic controls, that can be done by other robots too] and so they don't have any wages to 'consume'. The utopian 1950s view of this was vastly increased leisure, flying cars and people in white togas. The 2000s view is probably a vast undernourished resentful underclass and maximised value for 'shareholders'.

This sounds like an argument I've had with some conservatives I know. This notion that you can eliminate anything resembling socialism, but have it to where industrial automation improves our lives, is luftmensch nonsense.

You know what irks me about that? Listen to Opeth albums from the last 10 years. I've never measured it, but it sounds like there's precious little dynamic range. And the kicker is that Porcupine Tree's Stephen Wilson is Opeth's producer.

How do I go about booking my favorite band for the evening commute, anyway? And how the hell do I fit them into a Honda Insight?

I saw it explained on another website like this, and as I have no access to Chinese television I can't confirm this. Apparently there had been this trend of making programs in which a character would, for one reason or another, travel back in time to Imperial China. There, they would discover that pre-Revolutionary China was...well...pretty nice. This obviously presents a problem for the government since, although they're fairly Western in the business world, their government is still officially "Communist".

It would be easier to run Steam in Wine, or to use iBoot and Multibeast to install OS X on your PC.

Or you could run Windows. Or play games on a PS3, XBox 360, or Wii.

Eh, copy protection waxes and wanes.

Still have the metal box Quake 3 Linux package and CD. >_>

Same here. If only I could get it running on amd64 Ubuntu Lucid. :->

Yeah; I mean, you can run Steam on Wine, but that doesn't guarantee that many games will run.

As others will likely point out, if you want to play games on a PC, you should have Windows. We should keep lobbying for Linux-native games, but for the foreseeable future, we're going to need Windows.

Pet peeve: some titles have been sold as Mac-native but are actually running in Wine. Why do we not see this being done for Linux? I wouldn't mind paying for a version of a game pre-tuned for Wine, if the only choices are Wine or Windows.

I recently had to grab a copy of the AP Webfeeds Manager, which is a Java app. I had to have Silverlight for the thing. It wouldn't work with Moonlight. The webeed manager will run in OpenJDK, though (but it's utter crap.) And the interface? It looks just like their AP Exchange site, which is (AFAIK) just AJAXed HTML. Oy, vey.

If it ain't broke, break it anyway, right, Associated Press?

I never checked out the Google group, but always figured Bette Verboten was part of the problem. There's a whole group which made it no secret that they were gaming the system. It's part of a larger problem that you'll run into, especially if you've ever checked out the FOX Nation boards: if a story presents a viewpoint that's not totally right-leaning, then it's part of the evil liberal agenda. It's part of a larger sickness infecting political discourse in America, not just a Digg problem.

Jeez, if you're going to replace the musicians in the pit, why not go whole hog? It would probably be cheaper to film the production on a sound stage and show the whole thing on pay-per-view.

Wait, you mean the point is to get people to watch a live performance? EXACTLY!

I can see doing this in cases where I've seen it done well--when it's inconvenient to have a full orchestra but you want the sound of a full orchestra, such as a small-town performance (where you might be hard-pressed to hire a decent-sized competent orchestra)...but to do it on Broadway? Yuck.

Are you really comparing a $500 single-tasking gigantic iPod Touch to a chef's knife?

Argumentum ad absurdum.