That's it, basically. For example he says that in the game men can run for miles before quickly proning and sniping someone. IRL you'd have to catch your breath, take your time to get in a good position, ...

Canard PC (French PC gaming magazine) recently published an article written by a professional soldier about ARMA II, which is regarded as one of the most realistic shooters available. His conclusions were that ARMA was (very) far from being realistic, but that it was OK because it would have been boring and tedious to act exactly like a real soldier in a real war. So no, I don't think realistic shooters exist, and for good reasons.

I'm not a fan of Catholicism, nor any religion for that matter, I'm aware of the problems you mention, and I condemn them, but seriously, the catholic church is really not on the same level of malevolence as the CoS. Some catholics have done a lot of good to mankind recently (Mother Theresa of course, L'Abbé Pierre here in France, ...), but I don't know of any scientologist who has done the same because of his faith.

All I'm saying is that some religions really are more dangerous than others.

No news story, as there never even was a trial, and I haven't got the time to find links. I guess you'll have to take my word for it, and since it didn't happened to me directly I can't even guarantee that the story is true, but my mother's friend talked about it at length and seemed really distressed.

Ofc we have a notion of private property, but it can be really hard to evict tenants, IIRC the guy had signed up for electricity in his own name, and the bills "proved" that he lived there. We also have protection from vandalism, but when the vandal is a former homeless person who is now in jail for prostitution, you don't expect him to have any money nor insurance...

Then you'd get sued by the intruder...

And to clarify, my friend didn't live in the house yet because of the renovation, which explains how they could take over the house so easily. And he couldn't have lived with the intruder even if he wanted to, because in the eye of the law the intruder was the inhabitant of the house, not my friend, so he'd have had to ask the intruder the permission to live in his own house !

In France it doesn't work that way. One of my mother's friend witnessed it first-hand : strong guys came and knocked down the door of the house my friend had just bought and was renovating, then left. A third person moved into the house, and there was no way at all to force him to leave because he had not broken the door himself, even though this person had obviously no proof that he possessed or rented the house, and my friend had the property title. He did some research and found an extreme left website which provided instructions on how to take advantage of the law in this manner, going as far as providing a platform for homeless people to get into contact with the guys who would knock down the door.

A year later the police arrested the man for something completely unrelated (he was a transvestite prostitute), and my friend got his (by then completely destroyed) house back. All he could do was pay for renovation again, there was no way he could sue the person and have him pay the bills.

Gotta love a country where you can get jailtime for possessing even small amounts of marijuana, but where you can just "steal" a house from someone and thrash it completely without any consequences...

I buy software from Cydia you insensitive clod !

But I wouldn't buy an AV, I already have one. It's called passwd.

I'm running XBMC on a Zotac ION MB (A model I think, the one with a single-core Atom and 90W PSU). 1080p videos play without an hitch, skins run smoothly, and the system is passively cooled. Perfect solution for a relatively cheap media center. I'm running Arch but the XBMC live distro seems to work great.

I'm French and I'd whine as well. Here we pay 30€ per month for unlimited dl @ (up to) 28Mb/s (I'm getting about 1.2MB/s), IPTV (150 free channels), and unlimited phone calls to about 100 countries. Fiber is at the same price, but it's not widely available yet. Thank you Free for these low prices :)