I have to ask...is this as abused as I think it would be? In the US, we have people baiting celebrities into these kinds of situations for money on a fairly regular basis, but if people were allowed to start and then suddenly say "STOP" and claim they were raped because the perpetrator did not do so fast enough, I have to think it would be nearly constant. How on earth do you prove that? And further more, how do you prove the perpetrator heard "stop" in the middle of sex (where there's probably a lot of moaning, hard breathing involved) over the much more expected "don't stop?"

That's the one they choose? It wasn't the gaping security holes, the incessant patch requests (that are never even 6 steps behind the security holes) or the laborious installation/upgrade process? I'm sorry, I know blind people have it tough on the internet, but this is really the dumbest of the reasons I could imagine you would switch away from a nearly universally accepted format.

Messing with Anonymous has almost no consequences. The worst that happens if you DDOS's for one day. On noes! How will billion dollar companies ever survive such downtime? If Anonymous wanted to change anything, they'd DDOS these sites every week, maybe every day. At the moment, they're about as disruptive as a short power outage.

I knew she was this stupid when it comes to security. She was good at education and better at the budget than some, but her border security policy was awful and never did jack shit towards actually keeping anyone safe. Why she was selected for this, of all jobs, is beyond me. As I said, she could have been good at something else like Secretary of Education, but Homeland Security is possibly the worst possible position for her. She just has no grasp of what makes things secure (hint: it's not a fence/scanning machines).

...was just trying to make us all feel better? That was nice of her.

I totally had this idea for a sci-fi story I was writing...I wasn't sure it was well-founded in science, it just seemed like a good idea. Turns out I rule.

I can't hear dissenting opinions!

How is this different from not being able to buy tickets to an R rated movie? I never understood why game and movie sales aren't regulated in retail like movies are in the theaters. I'm all for anything that forces parents to pay more attention to what their kids are doing for entertainment.

Just goes to show you that no matter how annoying you can claim Microsoft to be, their user base can be equally so with their instance that decade-old software be their ONLY solution.

You gotta upgrade sometime, people.

I hate the Beatles, so I just wish he had done it sooner.

This is absolutely correct. Without Facebook's market of bored teens (and now adults), there would be no way this takes off. Browser games are literally a dime a dozen and from what I see, there's nothing in Farmville that separates it from the pack. Ironically, I think the original user base of Facebook (college students) are the least likely to pick up these games. Thanks for bringing all these wonderful new users and "features," Mark.

Totally disagree. For one, Civ takes way more thought and strategy. You are competing against something and must better your methods in order to win. For two, I know that in my own RTS playing time, I have to constantly and quickly calculate resources, allocate said resources, evaluate probabilities, problem solve for difficult defenses/offenses from my opponent, calculate build times and optimize efficiency of both production and damage output. I'll be the first to admit that nothing in this game makes me a mathematical/logical/tactical genius, but having to think about these things help to keep my mind sharp in such areas. There's a positive benefit to playing the game besides entertainment.

Now certainly, to each his own, regarding entertainment. To equate those two games though, is silly at best. It's like saying Chess and Candy Land are the same. Are they both games? Sure. Do they have comparable skill requirements or similar side-benefits bestowed to the player? Absolutely not. Does it make me an elitist for thinking that a game should have some challenge to overcome to be worth my time and mental capacity? Maybe.

Now if your wife pointed out that farmville and say...watching football were similar, I'd have to begrudgingly agree with her. I'll still insist that even watching a sporting event requires more thought than Farmville, but she'd be a lot closer than the comparison in the OP.

Not a shocking statement from a man justifying breaking up the most successful band in history to get high with Yoko Ono.

I never said it was much better in the past. I'm saying for all the advances in graphics, AI has taken a back seat, which has made games, in general, boring.

It seems the way to make AI these days is to make it really stupid and easy for the player to beat, unless the player turns it on hard mode, in which case, they see you from 5 miles away and one-hit you before you were aware the map had finished loading.

Studios are under a lot of pressure to churn out games as fast as possible these days and AI is suffering. The solution to making games challenging is to make them either never miss and insta-kill the player or to just give them tons of health and attack power, but keep them stupid. Neither strategy is entertaining and it would be nice to have actual care put into building intelligent, challenging AI instead.