Well this isn't the consumer model, that will come later and will most likely include headphones, who knows maybe even a mic, but this is probably more to see if the important tech can work out, headphones and mics are not the problem.

Monopoly is waaay older than that, it's at least from the 30s possibly even older! ^^

Oh yes, let's have MORE court cases! Especially the ones where it's this low-wage single mother going up against a multi-billion dollar company, those always turn out well. In the movies at least.

> that's own developers have shown no interest in creating a linux port, as I imagine will be the case with many many of the games that are on steam currently.

True, on the other hand many of the indie games have Linux versions, so if they all suddenly show up on Steam (hopefully they will finally apply a filter that won't show games you can't install, like Windows games showing up on OSX) other might start feeling the heat, especially when Valve can show the sales figures for those games to the ones that are doubting that there is any market. (One can hope hehe)

Wine is really cool, but it's just no good for many demanding games. You'll probably have to turn down your graphics settings (and some settings won't even be available) and even then it'll run slower than the original game. And that makes it a no-go for many online games. I remember playing WoW on Wine, which was okay because it doesn't require optimal frame rates, but over the years I tried again and again to play Counter Strike Source (not really a game that requires much from your CPU/GPU these days) and it's just unplayable (if you're not a total beginner).

It's not really, but of the 3 it's the most similar maybe. We're trying not to stray too far away from familiar territory for Java developers.

Well, we only just started on Ceylon and are not even finished yet, so it's a bit early to start comparing how many times it gets mentioned in relation to the rest, but people have to start some time :)

Maybe it's a bit like this: with quantum mechanics stating that you can't know all the properties of a particle at the same time it might be similar to taking a snowflake and wanting to detect if it's from the north or the south pole, but the moment you do that you can't measure it's shape, color or temperature anymore, in fact turning your snowflake into a southflake because that's the only thing you (can) know about it.

As a hobbyist photographer (you know the kind that has spent an inordinate amount of money of equipment, can take some decent pictures but has found out that he has no real talent) I concur completely. A really nice gimmick but I hardly see any practical value.

If you have over 300ms latencies to servers inside your ISP's own network then I would definitely call that unacceptable. With my ISP and fastpath enabled I often get 20ms to servers within the same country. Anything over 60 and I wouldn't be able to feed my Counter Strike addiction ;)

Same here and I actually thought it looked nicer without the glasses, the colors were more vibrant, but maybe the glasses were just bad quality...

For me it definitely had to do with the fact that I could afford spending the money, but still, I would spend it on games I *knew* I liked but I still wanted to play many others. So for a long time I kept pirating the games I'd never have bought, and of course once in a while I'd encounter something I really liked, just as sometimes I'd buy something that turned out to be really shitty.
But when Steam came along I completely stopped pirating, exactly because their service is even better than downloading pirated games: I don't have to look for it, I don't have to check the source is more or less okay (trojans, viruses, etc), don't have to go look for NoCd or similar patches. It's just there, almost instantly.

That's just playing word games, the "faith" we talk about here is in its well-known meaning of: "firm belief in something for which there is no proof : complete trust" (Merriam-Webster)

But if one was to say that "at one time or another science will be able to answer most questions", now *that* might be called faith.

But when pressed on that matter Einstein also said:

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

You present a list of religious scientists without ever knowing what they "really" thought, because we can't ask them anymore. We're talking about people who lived in a time where atheism often just wasn't an option. Heck, even in modern day US you will commit political suicide if you try to run for any kind of office while admitting you're an atheist.

Even so I can understand perfectly that there are scientists who are religious people, but only because they put some kind of artificial barrier between those two sides of their personality and refusing to let their beliefs be tainted by their reason (the faith part). But that doesn't take away from the fact that they can be extraordinary scientists.

Knowing 5 languages I can at least say that they definitely not get completely different and isolated areas, which would be as expected because probably the "machinery" that makes it possible at all is highly specific and sophisticated. I imagine that vocabulary and the grammar are stored in some way together but almost as if they get "tagged" with a specific language. But when you speak multiple languages you will have many moments when you mix up words or grammar rules and when learning them you will have doubts if a certain word or rule is part of language A or B (especially when they have similar roots).