This idea should be easy to test, statistically speaking. If he's right, then the populations with the worst mental degradation and more emotional instability should be found in those parts of the world where civilization first took root, while those populations who lived as hunter-gatherers until relatively recently (or even up to the present day!) should have a big intellectual advantage.

I am not aware of any such effect being measured and documented.

If there was ever any thought of wanting the game to run on Linux or Mac, why did he base it on CryENGINE to begin with? Isn't that sort of stupid? Really, isn't that all kinds of stupid? I should think that developers would have learned better by now.

For most of its history the USA did, in fact, operate as what we today would consider a libertarian country. All things are relative in politics, and our government (especially the federal government) used to be much smaller and less intrusive than it is now. It wasn't perfect by any means, but it did by-and-large work.

How would fire departments and libraries run in a libertarian country? The same way they do now, I guess, since those are examples of functions that haven't generally been taken over by big government -- yet. But we could do without the enormous social entitlement programs and global high-tech military presence that we've been taxing and borrowing like mad to support.

Franky, it really chaps my hide when I mention libertarianism or mention the Tea Party and then somebody comes back with, "OMG you want to get rid of public schools, public highways, libraries, fire departments, police, etc!" What the hell? Where do they get that from?

Transportation? Since when are Democrats for transportation? That's one of the many, many departments that have been cut, and slashed, and cut, and starved, and cut some more over the years to pay for the Sacred Cows of Congress: ever-expanding military budgets and social entitlement programs. This is why we have crumbling infrastructure, NASA unable to put people in space, borders like a sieve, national parks barely able to stay open, laughably under-staffed product safety testing, etc., etc.

That's the deal. It's a classic case of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours", with Republicans always willing to go along with more social programs as long as Democrats reciprocate by allocating more money for the military. Everything else has been cut to the bone and beyond, and then we've borrowed into a mountain of debt, and still growing with no end in sight. It's literally the only game that Congressmen know how to play anymore: buying support by funneling our own tax money (and now, more and more, borrowed money!) back to their districts by way of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Nanny State.

I always end up voting Libertarian. But of course, I live in Texas, which is now effectively a one-party state. The GOP certainly doesn't need my help here to win practically every contested position. (In off-cycle elections the GOP and LP are often the only ones to field candidates, as the Dems don't even bother trying anymore.)

The primary season here was hilarious, with every candidate flogging the airwaves and postal service with ads touting themselves as the most conservative figure in the state, and their opponent as the meanest, most low-down, lying, thieving, stinking skunk that ever lived!

Ballot access is partly determined by a party's showing in previous elections. Thus, voting Libertarian may not get anybody elected, but at least it helps keep them on the ballot.

You seem to have confused the words "liberal" and "libertarian". I certainly don't see today's liberals as champions of civil rights -- except for a narrow, demographically analyzed, carefully selected subset of those rights. And of course, conservatives are much the same, only with a different subset of rights that they fuss over while trampling on the rest.

The libertarians, as far as I can see, are the only faction who still hearken back to the principles of freedom and democracy that the USA was founded on, without irony or qualification.

I'd like to focus on this bit: "The ARM CPUs may still have a slight power use edge, but the difference will typically be dwarfed by the power consumption of the screen."

What ever happened to Pixel Qi anyhow? What ever happened to OLEDs? I assume people are still working on these more efficient display technologies. What is the hold up, and will any of them start turning up in the marketplace any time soon?

This looks a lot like what companies were promising a few years ago: an inexpensive netbook with an ARM processor and Linux (or "Smartbook" as Samsung labeled them). It seemed like everybody was jumping on the bandwagon, and then before they even reached the market everybody jumped off the bandwagon and cancelled them, with weak excuses like "there's no demand" and "nobody will accept a netbook without Windows". And now the tide has turned once more, and suddenly it's a good idea again??

I've been waiting a long time with money in hand. Maybe I'll finally get to spend it. I'll wait until I see a real OS (i.e. desktop Linux distro) running on it, though. Shouldn't be that hard, right?

WHY OH WHY is this not being sold with a full OS that can run non-web-based apps? I mean, surely it wouldn't cost any more money to put Debian (or Ubuntu, or Mint, or whatever) on this thing and let us run both browser stuff *and* regular Linux apps, right? What's the rationale for limiting it?

Somehow the president always gets blame (or credit) for the state of the economy, even though he has relatively little to do with it, and it's mostly just the luck of the draw whether a president presides over an economic boom or bust.

It's even more frustrating when a truly horrible president is given a pass on everything bad he's done, merely because the economy happened to do well while he was in office. Re: Bill Clinton

I don't understand how its even possible for the photograph to be copyrighted. As far as I know, copyright only applies to original works. If I take a photo of a 100 year old painting, my photo isn't an original work. It's just a copy. How is that copyrightable?

I could use it in a collage or something, transform it in some way, and make something out of it that's copyrightable, but I don't see any way that a straight-up photo of the painting can be. Does not make sense. (But then, there's a lot about copyright law these days that doesn't make sense to me.)

By coincidence I just took my first look at Amarok, coming from a background with the Mac and iTunes. Wow... I have never seen a more bizarre, confusing, cantankerous user interface. I couldn't figure out how to do anything, and I couldn't figure out what Amarok was trying to do. I found myself wondering about whoever designed this program. Were they on drugs? Seriously... How did somebody come up with this?

Certainly not the likes of Ubuntu. It's a behemoth.

Here's the good bit from The Register: However Zeidman contrives to ignore the incontrovertible evidence that MS-DOS was derived from CP/M, and instead establishes a straw man. Zeidman, who pictures himself in a deerstalker hat, asserts that he can refute the allegation that "Microsoft stole the CP/M source code" - a claim that has never been made, let alone contested.

Based on my own very limited historical knowledge, that's on-the-mark. I've heard many times over the years that MS-DOS was a clone of CP/M, but never before have I heard it suggested by anybody that Microsoft copied CP/M's code.

Those who love sausage and respect the law shouldn't watch either being made.

One of the more eye-opening things that came up in the article was how the earnings from superhero movies have overtaken the earnings from comics -- i.e. the Avenger's movie alone making more money than the entire comic book industry. So the question becomes, why even do comics anymore? Why not just let them wither away and focus on the movies?

I think that would be a huge mistake. Comic books are actually a great proving ground for fantastic stories. Because they are relatively cheap to produce, because the market is smaller, because they can afford to experiment and fail -- the comic books are a perfect incubator for ideas, stories and characters. Once you have a hit graphic novel, then it becomes much more viable to gamble the vast sums of money on a big-budget action-and-effects movie.

Of course we've had novels made into movies (and the converse) for many decades, but I think the comic book medium is a better fit than a written novel. The pacing and the visual nature of it translates much better. I'd even go so far as to suggest that this could work with other genres than superheroes. Maybe the movie studios should open their own comic book brands and get into doing sci-fi comics, horror comics, fantasy comics, and so forth -- not because there's a lot of money in selling them, but more because it's a great (and affordable) way to develop properties for the screen.