Since scientology (and, indeed, any large organization) probably has at least 1 person in its member pool who is crazy enough to shoot someone if they were convinced to...

I'm sure they're more than capable, as, again, is pretty much any large organization, but somehow I doubt even with all the paranoia around scientology that they're really killing people.

I don't feel threatened by surveillance cameras in public places at all, indeed, I feel safer knowing that if someone does pull some shit, there's at least a possibility that there'll be some footage of it...

Once the surveillance gets into our homes and private work spaces and whatnot, then that's a problem, and a serious one...

The problem there is that if there was ubiquitous monitoring of internet and email, how would you get in touch with the person on craigslist to arrange the purchase?

(somewhat pedantic paranoia, but it is a somewhat legit question!)

Yeah, honestly, for a video billed as being 100 cats loose in a store, I was expecting, you know, more cats being loose in a store....

That's exactly what I thought when I started reading this ... If $25 worth of the content from a $50 game is stripped out and offered as an expansion, no gaming company is going to charge $25, they're still going to charge $40-50, and then charge $25 a pop for the expansions. In a perfect world it would work fairly and it would be nice, but that's not how it is.

Plus, what about the millions of people with poor or no internet? DLC is all well and good but if it takes a month to download 2gb of data for your game, what good is that? I know most/all of us here have nice internet, but for example a good friend of mine lives in a relatively remote area and he actually has to use a crappy microwave link to get internet, and if he had to download gigabytes of game expansion data, that would suuuuuuuuuck...

Agreed, I have a relatively ancient Pentium M based Dell laptop that's actually snappier, more responsive, and more fun to use than the brand new netbook I have as well. The netbook has a much brighter and clearer screen, and the intel graphics accelerator does make the UI look nicer, but in terms of overall performance, the dell absolutely smokes it, no contest, which is pretty frightening considering the relative age and generation level of each cpu...

I always wonder how many of these failed space missions would have gone better if there was a little man or a robot or something that could crawl around on the probe and press the reset button or hit the solar panel unfolding motor with a hammer a few times to get it to finish opening up...

We need to start inventing more intelligent or easy to control microrobots that can do that grunt work that a person could do to keep the systems running good ;)

I'm moving to Korea soon and I'd love to be able to keep up with Family Guy and House and some of those shows, and if I could pay $9.99 a month to be able to get nice easy access to that, that would be awesome.

the question is then, can I? if my billing address is still in the USA, will it work, or will it block me due to the fact that i'll be connecting through a foreign ISP?

I didn't see anything on the initial post on hulu about that...

I for one am not really at all afraid of someone launching ballistic missiles at us. The fact that it hasn't happened yet gives me some comfort that chances are, humans aren't quite that suicidal as a whole.

What does scare me is some lone crazy group getting ahold of a nuke and sneaking it into a city. Missile defense systems aren't going to do anything to protect us from that.

You spend all the time and effort bringing them back, only to have them all die again because of a lack of biodiversity caused by them being based on one parent..

Cold war era paranoia is worth it's weight in gold. I'm sure every satellite launched back then with anything remotely resembling a secret on it, had a device perfectly capable of destroying it all!

It depends on where the previous poster lives... I grew up drinking well water, which was as cool and pure as you can get pretty much, so I find myself being fairly sensitive to what's in city water. Some places I've been, the city water tastes fine, other places the water has a distinct smell and taste, which if you're used to how water "should" taste, is really hard to miss.

For less than $10 I'd buy a lot more cd's than I do now. $9 to download an album, or $8-10 to get the better quality hard copy, it's a no-brainer.

With regards to the Japanese and Korean conglomerates; money doesn't care about history.

I was always under the impression that taking paracetamol and other similar drugs along with alcohol was rather unhealthy to the liver and whatnot...

Drinking lots of water is always good though!