Although they're not on the slate for next year. :(

This is the answer, more or less. For small-to-middling forums, reducing spam is pretty easy. A few volunteers to delete the ones that get through suffices for the rest.

It breaks down to 1) keep out easy drive-by spammers, which means registration with a valid email address and some kind of barrier to detour the smarter bots (ReCaptcha and the like); 2) filter posts through Akismet or similar method; 3) have a community large enough and engaged enough to want to zero out spam posts.

The third step is the hardest, and has nothing to do with spam posts.

Do I get to register preferences about what messages I will want to receive, or will some wanker with authority decide that for me? The last thing I want is for the person who decides which messages are important being of the same mindset as the nimrod who thought passengers at an airport need to be reminded every 5 minutes exactly what the list of banned items on airplanes are - again and again and again and again while you wait for your flight. (What's really dumb about that recorded TSA message is that it interrupts other PA messages that are NOT repetitive and thus should have higher priority. What's more important - the message that is identical to the one you heard 5 minutes ago and will hear again 5 minutes from now, or the message that's unique and you'll only hear once? You should never stifle the one-off message with the repeated one, and yet that's what airports do. (I just returned from a trip where I heard my name on the PA trying to tell me something and it got interrupted like this and I never found out what it was about until it was too late. It turns out I had gotten a standby slot on a flight, but missed the chance because the PA system was designed by morons who think recorded repeated messages take precedence.))

Anyway, I don't want the same sort of moron deciding what messages come to my phone (or worse yet, which ones are allowed to interrupt a phone call) without my say-so.

I don't think the concern is an after-market cracker doing it. I think the concern is that if it can be done after-market then that proves it can also be done by the original manufacturer of the hardware. I don't put it past OEM's to make backdoors for themselves.

The alternate universe you live in is interesting. It would have been nice to see this IE 6 that actually had a better look than its contemporary competitors. It's too bad that the only IE I ever got to see was the ugly-looking one that existed here on earth where the rest of us live.

No sympathy here. They get what they deserve. These are the myopic idiots that didn't care about the detrimental effects of vendor-tie-ins when they were hurting OTHERs with this garbage. They get no sympathy from me now that it's come full circle to bit themselves in the ass.

And with Net Neutrality, if you don't get good government-regulated service... what?

Or are you pretty confident that the FCC will handle regulating the Internet as well as they do, say, terrestrial radio and broadcast TV?

I don't agree because I think games will always expand to fill the available clock cycles - in sort of the same way that software bloats to fill the available disk space. People making the cutting edge games will make them fill ALL available CPU usage. If it's not using it all up, then that means features that were trimmed out can be left in instead of being cut.

By thinking that the human's reflexes are the limiting factor in how much CPU usage the computer needs, it shows you're not really thinking about all the work the computer does under the hood. Say you're playing a graphics-intensive driving game like GTA. Having more CPU cycles means the NPC's can be smarter. The drivers can drive more realistically. The machine can track the motion of all the cars in the city instead of having them leave memory when they get far enough away. (Current generation GTA games have the "peeka-boo" effect where things don't exist when you can't see them. More CPU cycles would mean better object permanence and people and cars can be doing things "off screen".)

Games will expand to fill the available CPU cycles.

As someone who several months ago went through the hell of trying to understand RPTools, and its truly hideous macro language( with a language interpreter that doesn't tell you where the syntax error is, a language grammar that cannot be expressed in BNF because of its wacky rules, and documentation that exists primarily in the form of web forum posts and a Wiki site that is incorrect much of the time), I welcome any other serious competitor into this field.

Another advantage of this approach has to do with how it's networked. By being hosted remotely, it doesn't have the same problems with needing to do port forwarding like RPtools requires (a fine idea if you're at home but not if you're using the wireless router of your local game store and want to allow some participants to join in from the 'net with some participants being face to face at the game store.)

I can't see 3D movies for a reason that is not due to my vision (well not directly anyway). That is that I can't get the damn 3D glasses to fit over my normal eyeglasses without falling off, and when I do devise a jerry-rig to get them to stay on (usually involving rubber bands that I now know to bring with me to the theatre when it's a 3D movie), the 3D glasses are now too far away from my eyes to have the correct effect. (I keep seeing the frames and my eyes want to focus in on them instead of the movie because the frames are now no longer on the periphery but are now more toward the center of vision since they're further forward than they're supposed to be.)

It seems that if I want to see 3D movies I'll have to get LASIK first to ditch the eyeglasses.

Then again, I'm one of those people who can never get the Magic Eye (tm) pictures to come out right so maybe that won't be enough. I understand the optics of Magic Eye and I know perfectly well why it works, from a mathematical point of view. But where I fail is that I can't decouple my conscious control of my eyeball focus from the conscious control of my eyeball's inward aiming angle, which is a necessary step to making Magic Eye work. You have to *focus* your eyes close at the nearby paper while *aiming* them far away far into the distance past the paper instead of converging their aim to a point on he paper. For me those two things are not seperable commands my brain knows how to issue to my body. It's like asking me to move my pinkie without also moving my ring-finger. The pathway from my brain to the muscles to make that happen isn't available. They're wired together whether I like it or not. For me, the muscles that control eyeball shape (focus) and the muscles that control eyeball aim are mentally grouped together and respond to one single thought. The thought of "look close" or "look far" triggers BOTH motions, no matter how hard I try to separate the two into independantly controlled actions. (When you think about this, it makes sense for a brain to build up that behavior from birth since there is no natural situation where you would ever want to separate them OTHER than the man-made illusion of Magic Eye. A clever cerebellum can learn that these muscle motions always seem to go together and it can develop the learned behavior to marry them together into one single "command" even in a crude brute-force fashion that destroys the ability to command them seperately, as has happened in me.)

Fail.
Sure, in the imaginary universe where you were correct about what "atheism" means that would be true, but why don't you try acting like an honest person and use the actual meaning of the word that exists over here in the real world.

VM's introduce a huge slowdown unless they're able to use the hardware natively because the emulated machine is hardware-compatible with the host machine. So, the reason VMware works so well is that it emulates intel machines... on intel machines. If it had to emulate a different CPU, it would be quite a bit slower than the native hardware.

VM's are good for backward-compatibility with previous generation machines, where you can accept the slowdown of a VM because the new machine is faster than the emulated one. But as a way to compete with a competitor's machine of the same generation, both cutting edge, it won't be fast enough unless everyone's using the same hardware architecture under the hood.