Ex 1980's taxi driver here, public holidays are dead times, surge times used to be called Friday and Saturday night, but the price didn't change.

You regard being called 'human' denigrating?

The sides of the trench are tectonic plates, both plates are diving into the crust, in 2000yrs the drums will be absorbed into the crust.

There's enough space junk whizzing around Earth now, why pollute the space around other planets if it can be avoided? There's also the possibility of doing "last minute" science as the probe descends that cannot be done from orbit, eg: atmospheric sampling.

How to piss off an Aussie

AFAIK the only thing that is censored in an R18 rated game/movie is explicit sexual violence (rape porn), CP, explicit beastiality, etc. For a long while there was no R18 rating for games, they were assumed to be for children so the highest rating was MA16. Game studios would deliberately get a "banned" for publicity reasons, but unrated games have always been legally available on the net.

We don't have a 'viable [domestic] market' for big budget movies/games because of our tiny population, nothing to do with our movie rating system which is far more permissive than most of our neighbours in SE Asia. Hollywood movies are typically shot on location in AU/NZ because it's cheaper than making them in the Hollywood.

NVidia have freely available, user hardened, linux drivers for all of their hardware, and a large scientific/gaming community that uses them. Same deal for NVidia's windows drivers.

...because...
- They will flush 50% or more of their own revenue down the toilet.
- It sounds too much like extortion/ant-trust, and is probably illegal.
- NVidia already comply with their stated goal.

IMO Steam is a glorified shopping cart that invades your PC and "manages" your purchases, they don't "own" anything, they are middlemen. I prefer to go directly to the vendor, if it's exclusive to steam I won't buy it because I refuse to install their malware gateway on my PCs. IMO the freemium model used by game studios such as wargaming.net is much more consumer friendly, just register, d/l, scan, hit install, and you done. From a business POV, wargaming.net has proved beyond doubt that a talented game studio combined with a player friendly freemium model can make you very rich, very quickly.

It's important that players who subscribe to a freemium game only gain a meta-game advantage, for example in WoT nothing you can buy in-game for real cash will give you a significant advantage on the battlefield. However a "wallet warrior" (me) will climb the tech/skill ladder ~1.5X faster than a "welfare warrior", a "wallet warrior" is able to extend the size of their garage/barracks, recycle expensive tank add-ons, paint their tank, etc.

Freemium models that significantly handicap a "welfare warriors" ability to compete with "wallet warriors" simply won't get enough players to attract a profitable community of paying customers, and the game will die. Note that the freemium model also applies to some traditional games (on a computer), such as internet bridge clubs who make money hosting tournaments, hosting bridge holidays on a cruise ship, selling/advertising advanced lessons, etc.

NVidia - I have found them to be a developer friendly company (CUDA, etc). NVidia have a large linux user community for scientific applications, their linux driver works, Yes, it would be nice if they could find a way to open source everything and there's no harm politely asking/reminding them, but hurling abuse at them for choosing not to is the act of a spoilt child. I for one, don't want OSS devs to be associated with spoilt children.

Disclaimer: Buying video games since I dropped my pocket money into a pong machine at mum & dad's local pub, circa 1970.

Don't talk nonsense and dress it up as "scientific". "Scientific consensus" is just the modern phrase for what Karl Popper called "the republic of science". People who complain about the meaning of either term are not scientists, they are usually partisan political hacks who have never heard of Karl Popper and think AGW is a some kind of gigantic conspiracy to take away their SUV.

Of course we're not on a balloon, everyone knows we are the raisins in an expanding pudding.

Is there any other kind?

Nothing to do with tone deafness. If you weren't exposed to an Asian language as a child then your brain simply won't hear some of the sounds in Asian languages, in fact your brain actively filters out the unfamiliar sounds as "noise". The same is true for Asian children, which is why virtually ALL Asians have trouble with "R" and "L" sounds. It's all about how your neurons are wired in the first few years of life, it's why a 2yo can become fluent in a new language in a matter of months while an adult may take years or even decades to achieve "native" fluency.

I saw a short doco about a guy who taught his toddler to speak Klingon. The kid loved playing the Klingon "game" up until the age of 3, then suddenly refused to play the Klingon game with dad. Turns out that Klingon is great for describing life aboard a star ship but was useless to the toddler because there were too many everyday things that did not have a Klingon word ( eg: no word for "cookie" ). At 3 years old the kid had already worked out what many geeks (and the submitter) still struggle with, English is useful, Klingon is not.

If you are going to blame Clinton (or Bush) for the GFC, then logically you must credit Obama with fixing it.

Really, that was her job?