There's an old behavioral psychology experiment that seems to fit the situation:
To train a horse to lift one of its front legs whenever a bell rings, you start out with a piece floor that can be partially electrified to deliver a mild shock. You ring the bell, you deliver the shock. After a while the horse learns that to avoid discomfort it needs to raise its leg. It lifts the leg - no pain.
Now comes the tricky part: after a while you remove the shocking floor. Now the horse will still lift its leg whenever the bell sounds; and what's more, this behavior will even become stronger and stronger ingrained, since there is no more punishment and the "correct" behavior is re-inforced.
Now assume that instead of a horse there is a user, replace the electric shock with annoyance inflicted by ads and the act of lifting the front leg with using adblocking software. This means that in order to overcome the strong aversion of adblock users you have to offer a very, very high incentive and strong proof that reverting to the old browsing habits will not be punished by more annoying ads.

No, we really, really, don't. I hate ads with a passion, and I can't imagine a situation where I would rather have any space in-game taken up by an ad display than a blank space or a simple generic texture.
This goes double for ads that require an internet connection to update and waste my bandwidth for something I have no interest in.
And lastly, I can not imagine finding anything relevant in an in-game ad: Wow, the new Ferrari is out! I must buy one immediately! Hey, the cinemas in Left4Dead 2: The Bloodening advertise the newest RomCom, surely a must-see!
I play games to fucking escape my ordinary life, not to have the worst aspects transplanted into it, especially since most games don't have realistic (as in "real-world") characters in them, anyway ("90% of all genetically enhanced super-soldiers agree: Clearasil is the choice of space marines!").

Seriously, fuck you. And get back to me when you can say that on American television; until then, continue denying that anyone in America ever fucked.

"the process will take a bit 1220 minutes"
OMG, if the clean install is something like 4.8GB then that would be 4.13175854 * 10^10 bits, times 1220 minutes/bit equals 95 840 997.1 years!

Could we please get some explanatory links in here? This reads like a mix between a corporate nightmare ("harmful to our velocity"? SERIOUSLY?) and the rantings of an MMORPG nerd ("I was a level 72 ScrumMaster specced for Agility, but then they nerfed that and our Team Leads couldn't afford the new +5 leadership crafts, so we completely tanked at the Waterfalls of Development, even though we hired N00Bs as cannon fodder!").
Jargon, people! And don't chastise me for not RTFA - there is no FA to read!

Only now you have a nuclear reactor on a ship that might get hit by a missile.
While I can understand the basic reasoning behind this procedure you will always need to have a large concentration of energy around if you want, well, a large amount of energy at your disposal. And large amounts of energy are inherently dangerous; the only way to make them safer is to require less in the first place. Which means in this case storing the energy in conventional fuel, not something generated by a lossy process. This also allows for a more distributed risks instead of a single point of failure - take out the fuel generating ship and pretty soon the rest of the fleet and the planes won't be able to function.

I love trying to get around triggers when playing heavily scripted games. In many cases you can just avoid setting monsters or events off, and I enjoy it when you can just use the game's unfair tricks against it: "Oh, if I do that the game will teleport several elite forces into my camp." *moves camp* *builds traps and defense towers* *triggers event*
I also like looking at enemies when they're frozen in inactive states - I hate that in almost all games nowadays the corpses just disappear after seconds, so you can never really get a look at the monster design.

I mean, how can you overlook something as glaring as a missing space? "Anonymous Cowardon" indeed!
What I miss most is some kind of feedback corner - ok, sometimes the admins invite comments on new stuff, but those threads vanish too rapidly from the front page. Why not include a simple new slashbox named "Feedback" where people could notify the editors and administrators of things that bug them? This might also be an easy way to improve the site by pointing out common problems (spelling errors in submissions could be caught faster and more reliably than by posting in the respective threads, where notices would be modded as "off-topic" or even "troll" when the error was corrected, for instance).

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
- H. L. Mencken

That's what open source and reverse engineering are for. Check out CHDK - a firmware add-on mainly for the Canon Powershot and Ixus series. It allows several of the things you mentioned (maybe all, I only tried out some of the stuff), and in addition it gives your camera the ability to run scripts, making things like exposure or focus bracketing a cinch.

Am I the only one to notice that the tag attached to the story right now is actually "Causation Is Not Correlation" - which is complete and utter gibberish (as opposed to "Correlation Is Not Causation" which is at least an actual phrase)?
How is it possible for misspelled or just plain wrong tags like this to get to the front page?

I'm not saying that this might not be the reality, but really, think about to the specs you mentioned: 2 gigabytes of RAM. A dual core processor. 80 GB hard drive.
And all of that just to get the operating system to run! I mean, what are office computers used for? I'd wager that 90% of "office use" consist of text processing, internet browsing, emailing and instant messaging. I used to do word processing on a 386! And it was fast!
I really don't want this to appear like a personal attack, but why the hell are people willing to accept something like this? It bugs the hell out of me that perfectly good computers - computers that have a hundred times more power than actually needed for the tasks they're used to - are thrown away because the underlying operating system is so greedy that it can't run smoothly with fewer resources than those you mentioned.