... And yet another reason why I am so glad I use sonic.net as my ISP. I've been with them since the 90's when they were a small county wide internet service provider and they've always been great. Sure I could spend 5 dollars less a month (or maybe even more) with comcast or AT and T but it's worth it to me that my money goes to a company that treats its customers so well and actually gives a rats ass about my privacy rights. About once a quarter I get an email from these guys discussing proposed legislation that threatens my data privacy rights along with suggestions as to what I can do about it. Absolute love it.

If you live in Northern California you'd do well to look into them for your service.

Whether Steam is or can be cracked is irrelevant, Steam is helping to push us farther and farther down the path of us "leasing" our games instead of buying them. As it stands now, when I "buy" a Steam game I really have no idea whether I'll be able to play the game five years from now or even a month from now when the game makes its mandatory check in with their servers. All I have to go on is the good will of some faceless corporate entity and the assurances of Steam fans that this could never happen or that there will be some wonderful work around that will be less convenient than just being able to install my game and play like I should be able to.

The worst part is, it's as easy pirating a game today as it was 10 years ago when all that was on games was Safedisc. Really brings home how ridiculous all of these inconvenient measures are, right?

Really this is something that Americans from all over the political spectrum should be happy about (I personally sway to the blue).

Sadly, most of the public either doesn't care or is completely ignorant of the issue.

I'm not sure your post does what you want it to do, which is to assure us of the value of 3d in cinema. I would even go as far as to say that your post does the exact opposite.

3d within the context of cinema (including this latest attempt) has always looked terrible and added little to the experience aside from novelty; hence it's lack of perseverance in each era. There are certainly exceptions where you can point to a minimal amount of value added to the cinematic experience but these are exceedingly rare and have had minimal impact on cinema as a whole. I went to Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, both in 3d and felt cheated out of the extra money I spent for these experiences and like a sucker for being duped by this latest run of gimmickry that seems to pop up every 20 years or so (and no, I'm not one of those people that "3d" doesn't work on. It all jumps out at me, it just looks like crap when it does).

This latest run, just like all of the others, is just Hollywood trying to milk a few extra bucks out of people.

I sort of agree with you and sort of don't in regards to using the keyboard as I think it depends on where your hands are at when you want to launch something. In Windows if your hand is on the mouse it's faster to minimize either one window or hit the minimize all on the quick launch and then open something on the desktop. If your hands are already on the keyboard then it's faster to do what you've laid out (I do both). On top of that, some people don't want to be bothered learning all of the keyboard shortcuts so the mouse is just "easier".

I do so love some of the desktop clutter I've witnessed though. When I was in school a while back I would do light computer tech stuff for my parents friends to make a few extra bucks. I honestly don't know how some of these people could let their desktops get like they did. Most of the time they didn't even know what half of the icons on their desktop did.

Definitely insightful.

I wish I could mod you "awesome"

Who writes an article like this? Half of the mentioned games don't have any images at all and instead feature lame one line descriptions of the box art. Of the other half that the author bothered to provide images for, over half of those don't have contrasting images which makes the posting of the one image pointless as well.

*psst* How is suggesting people can do without driving unreasonable? 30% of Americans get to work without cars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States#cite_note-2001summary-2

And by the way, just tossing that out there for perfectly reasonable debates to descredit some one is trolling.

We do things every day we don't need to do that have tiny detriments to the safety to others. Shoot, every time I leave the house I put people at risk just by virtue of the fact that I might bump into them. How about driving in general? If no one drove we would all be a hell of allot safer. So while it is not hard to not drink it is an inconvenience that I don't think is worth having as, with much of the things we do in life, the return on public safety is negligible.

And no I don't think most people in my community would agree with that. That's why my state does not have a zero tolerance policy for alcohol while driving. Plus, I live in California, where thanks to the initiative system, the people do have a direct means of changing this. It wouldn't be hard at all for MADD to get this on the ballet as the number of signatures needed is fairly small for a group that size. They don't because they know it wouldn't stand a chance of passing and would cast them in a radical light, thus discrediting their organization.

Says the atheist so firm in his faith of non-faith. The fact of the matter is that plenty of people believe in sin so the concept is something we all have to deal with.

Plus, if one were to logically extrapolate your argument, we're all endangering people by the act of driving alone. Much like we don't need a glass of wine with dinner we don't need to drive at all. Get a bicycle and a job closer to home or at least do mass transit to limited the number of large, high speed, lumps of steal moving about our communities. Kids, bicyclists, and the elderly would all be a hell of allot safer moving about town. Probably much safer then if everyone went with zero tolerance.

Of course I don't advocate the above in any strict sense (there's exceptions but that would be a crazy tangent) because much like not driving is inconvenient, so is not enjoying the beverage of my choice (in moderation) with dinner in the name of a negligible return (relative to the world we live in) in public safety.

Because (within the aforementioned context of a glass of wine with a meal) it's imposing an inconvenience for a negligible return in public safety.

It's not about it being hard to not drink (I do it probably 5 days a week under normal conditions) it's the pain of the ass of having puritanical types tell me I can't have a nice glass of wine with my meal. Our driving is impaired due to lots of things such as lack of sleep or stress. Perhaps we should mandate that all drivers get a good 8 hours under them every time they hop in a car? Bad day at work? No driving for you then, you're clearly a hazard!

I seriously doubt that a simple glass of wine or pint of lager with a meal is significantly more of hazard than getting 5 or 6 ours of sleep instead of 8. Would you refute this claim?

This was mentioned before in another post by some one else but the point is a good one. Drivers are awash with distractions while driving. From radios, to cell phones, to passengers, to road signs and billboards, to 6 hours of sleep instead of 8, to all of the other cars on the road, to motorcycle riders passing within ones lane on the side during slow traffic conditions (legal but distracting as all hell). Are we planning on banning all of these? This summary doesn't even state how distracting the impairment is as the stated conclusion merely states that the impairment is reliably present. I'm fairly certain one having a bad day at work would generally result in a reliably diminished ability to drive.

To be perfectly honest, I think motorcycles endanger those around them while driving. One can't tell how far away they are when they are approaching at night because they have only one headlight, they get the aforementioned ability to pass me within my own lane when the traffic is slow so one has to worry about some jerk dragging some part of his bike down ones paint job, and they're much harder to see (especially the smaller bikes) while one is driving under all conditions.

And by the way, by the time I finish eating and talking, my glass of wine with my meal won't put me over the sensible limit we have in my state so your snide mocking in relation to me paying thousands to get to work is irrelevant. It must be a great view from way up there though, casting judgment and laughing at all of us poor sinners.

I was referring to the parents claim that any drinking and then driving was objectionable