This is definitely true but I would also add "offer to help with the changes" (or find someone who is capable of helping). Outsiders may have good ideas about how to fix things, but anyone can be a critic. That can be annoying to the original maintainer who has to do the work, regardless of how much it improves the system.

That's actually a really cool setup you described. Would you be willing to share detailed build instructions, including the software setup? Strictly for educational and entertainment purposes, of course :)

Your theory is basically valid, but the practical reality and the empirical evidence of the last, I dunno, 20 years or so, is that the graphics processing takes a significant amount of computing power. There's a reason that virtually every computer and every game console has a dedicated GPU. For that matter, a dedicated sound processing chip. It's all offloaded and the APIs have improved to the point that it doesn't seem like much work, but those specialized chips are burning an awful lot of power.

For a wide variety of games, the game logic just isn't that complicated, or rather, it doesn't require as much computing horsepower as the rendering. Sports games and FPS are the most obvious but I'm sure there's others. The most CPU intensive game I can think of is Civilization 4. I'm sure it's been surpassed, and yeah the AI still sucks, but late in games you can really tell that the CPU is chugging away.

The truth, of course, is that something will ALWAYS be a bottleneck. The argument seems to be: is it the CPU or GPU?

This is sensationalism. Even small planes have a boatload of "distractions" to observe: radio, gauges, displays, maps, etc. Adding a cell phone into the mix isn't exactly overloading the pilot, unless he's doing something REALLY stupid like texting on final. He might have been USING a cell phone, but he was probably just overconfident as to his abilities as a pilot. There's also a major difference between talking on the phone in your car and in a plane. In auto traffic, you have to manage the car continuously, keep an eye out for traffic, deal with traffic lights, and on and on. Piloting certainly requires a lot of skill but you aren't twitching the stick and throttle and braking every 2 seconds, and since most planes have autopilot, it can be pretty relaxed.. There's plenty of time en route to send a text or make a call, and to do so safely.

Credit card merchant banks already do this. Merchants pay more for "card not present" transactions (anything online) and certain types of businesses pay different discount rates. Hotels generally pay more than "regular" storefront merchants, for example. Restaurants and gas stations pay different rates. I think government agencies generally get the best rates but I'm not sure.

However, the rates for adult content merchants are already sky high (12-15% vs around 3% for non-adult merchants) because, surprise, there's a lot of fraud. Many banks have decided that they simply don't want to deal with it for ANY price. Paypal served adult merchants at one time but they stopped long ago, maybe 2004.

Two words: "common carrier". They get to escape liability but the trade-off is that they are regulated and have to cooperate with law enforcement. You can of course run a Tor node, and claim you are cooperating but unable to trace the connection. I can almost guarantee that some enterprising prosecutor will eventually decide that this is obstruction of justice, or aiding and abetting, and then you will be charged for someone else's criminal activity. Why anyone would want to take this risk is beyond me. You won't even be able to cut a plea bargain because you can't figure out who the crook is to give up.

Only the most paranoid can remember if they last logged in at 8:15 or 8:25. It's not a credible method of deterring casual logins when the attacker already has the login info. Also, some form factors don't provide a simple means of returning additional information upon a successful login. Think of a Web service where the username and password are included in the request. You'll get a success or failure response and that's it. Even if the service returns more detail, there isn't always a sensible way to alert the actual user, other than denying access on a failure.

Physical tokens like keys don't require such frequent replacement because (in general) they are difficult to compromise without alerting the holder. Someone has to actually steal your key and take it to the hardware store without you noticing. Passwords, on the other hand, can be shoulder surfed, socially engineered, stolen with malware, stored in plain text in the database, shared with someone else, etc., and the user may have no clue his password is compromised. Also, if someone steals your key and robs your house, and there was no sign of forced entry, you probably would change the locks. But someone with your password could log in as you without you noticing for... well, maybe forever, depending on the system. I agree it can be overdone, but it is a good security practice and there is some logic behind it.

I'll second that and also put in my own vote for Flip Cup. It's a drinking game; I'm sure everyone has their own way of playing, but the rules are not terribly important. The reason I vote for Flip Cup is because it finally got my wife to start drinking beer. "AT LAST! Now we can share everything!"