Yeah, the Trek angle is sort of covered by "Engage!" , but this one is so much better.

And the parodies are priceless
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

The government has files on everyone (or nearly everyone); people never suspected of, or implicated in, any crime.

How is this different from what the Stasi did?

Was that perhaps the day you got a bigger monitor? Motion sickness is primarily influenced by what goes on in your peripheral vision. I've only ever gotten motion sickness on sims with wraparound displays on the sides, and it's quite awesome. Still saving up for extra screens for my gaming rig at home so I can have those side panels.

The founders of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had, at the time, just faced down a global fascist hegemony, which made those rights seem just and proper and self-evident for great peace and wellbeing.

Now those founding states are becoming a global fascists hegemony ... they're not so keen on them.

Quelle suprise! :)

Heh, thanks! My old man will appreciate the correction ;)

The whole G+ real-name crap kept me away but it did teach me something I wouldn't have otherwise known if I *had* started using the service:

I can get along perfectly fine without Google +.

The God of Thunder is at a particularly successful orgy and sees a good-looking woman wandering around in her toga. He puffs up his chest and proclaims to her, "Hi, I am Thor!"

The woman looks back and says, "Ugh, yeth, I'm thor too, I'm thor all over."

Yeah, the Lenovo T420s has an array of mics up top around the webcam, and in theory they can be used to filter out noise from typing and be tuned to pick up the voice of the talker and not the speakers. But I went through all that calibration and it still sucks... it does filter out a lot of the keyboard noise but it also attacks the voice as well. Maybe someday Lenovo/Conexant will release better, more tunable drivers, but I haven't seen anything positive on any of the Lenovo support message boards yet.

In Lenovo's defense, I bought a z710 for my wife, and it appears to work great with Skype and stuff out of the box (though I've never sampled the audio quality on the far end of the call). It's a nice little desktop replacement box, at the time probably the cheapest laptop I could find with a 1920x1080 LCD and a half-decent NVidia GPU. Of course, it still has an Intel 4000 integrated GPU as well for "hybrid power savings"... you can't disable the iGPU, and the thing would BSOD with any 3D applications using the Nvidia GPU until I installed the right combination of driver updates relatively recently.

Onboard sound sucks.

My work laptop (Lenovo T420s) is useless for microphone audio (some Conexant chip). The company keeps wanting us to use Skype and Lync and SoftVTC to do meetings, but all the people who try to use the onboard audio are inaudible (because the built-in noise cancellation keeps ducking their voice), or if they manage to dig 5 dialogs deep to disable the noise cancellation (with an option that gets reset every reboot), they have lots of system noise over their voices (even if they're using an external mic. ). So everyone dials in via phone for group VTCs and mutes their PCs.

I have an expensive Jabra headset with a USB dongle. That gives me pretty clean audio. Should be able to use bluetooth too, but that takes more driver updates and even then it's still a pain.

My gaming PC has somewhat nicer onboard audio, but even with a S/PDIF link to my Logitech Z-560 speakers, I still get a hiss whenever the OS turns on and "opens" the audio device. Would be nice to be able to input digital audio somehow for Skype, but I ended up just plugging in a cheap USB webcam with a digital mic instead.

Still, it's kinda sad that any cheap mobile phone has a better microphone with AEC (for speakerphone use) and NC than you can get on most computers.