This I have to second. Really that is the problem with the majority of MMORPGs these days. WoW is actually closer to an exception, in the sense that the hours to get to cap, are pretty small compared to the amount of time one spends in raids etc... after getting to cap, compared to many other MMO's in which there is no point in the game in which partying becomes the standard, or said point is so insanely far down the road that under 10% of players reach it. What baffles me is how many players complain when it is harder to solo than to group up. If the game makes grouping easier, but soloing harder, then people who want to work harder and solo can. When the game makes grouping the hard way and soloing easier, then the 10% that want to group up, spend 2 hours looking for a group, because 95% of players are going to go the most efficiant way no matter what, and the people who actually want to have fun and group up, have to spend hours trying to find others. I've always considered solo MMORPGs analogous to inviting a whole bunch of friends over to play solitare.

You are behind the times on most of these, the news stories of police stations experimenting with the tech, and making porn came out weeks ago (there's even an app for making porn already). Crime on the other hand I imagine backfiring rather quickly, gives great easy to access evidence for the police after your arrest, there are better sneakier devices to do that out now, that don't involve ties to a big company that tracks everything you do. But hey we've got people posting their ill gotten gains on facebook and then getting supprised that they are arrested all the time, so nothing new here. Casinos? what kind of dumb casino's are we talking about here. Again tiny hidable cameras have existed for years, glass by comparison is bulky, blatently visible and well known already. Casinos are not known for having poorly trained staff, and being behind the curve on technology (ones that aren't, don't stay in business long). When it comes to illegal actions, glass is just a terrible choice.

Not to mention the secondary cost, lets assume testing is the same on both situations, a car goes out to the manufacturer, update is applied, update botches, car software system is bricked. The dealer can pull a spare hard drive or whatever it is stored on out of the back, get the car up and running etc... Now OTA update botches, does the dealer make a house call to swap out the car's storage, or do they pay for a tow truck? When an update fails and the device is rendered unusable... getting a car to the location to be repaired is considerably more expensive than a phone.

Safety + security indeed, which in this case are one and the same. Imagine someone manages to spoof an OTA update for your car, and it is a trojan horse causing your car to go into a serious wreck etc... Potential side effects could be devastating.

people subject to views outside of logic, may switch between them at random. Also very few if any religions explicitly say anything against life on other plannets, if christianity is what we are talking about, it says nothing to oppose life on other plannets, it simply never mentions the concept at all. Just as it never mentions kangaroos, koala bears or the american continent. If a spacecraft were to land on earth, the only thing christians would see different is in spite of us being clearly technologically inferior to them, christians would still hold to the idea that humans are made in the image of god, and thus the aliens must have been created by god to serve us in some way.

Creationist is a pretty bad example. first off being a creationist, doesn't bar people from science in any field. When a creationist or anyone else sets forth data or experiments, it is put through the peer review process and tested for validity. Someone already pointed out, newton was a creationist, but his laws of motion worked just fine within their context. He also believed in alchemy. His belief in alchemy and the supernatural, had no impact on the acceptence or rejection of his physics. Nor does his brilliance in physics, give alchemy a free pass into accepted science. The assumption that all laws of physics, are subject to change at the whims of a supernatural being, of whom we cannot get to break the laws under controlled conditions because he doesn't like being tested, will not be accepeted by the scientific community, but that has no bearing over whether the scientific community will accept a testable provable claim, made by someone who holds beliefs that are untestable or flat out rediculous.

You seem to be under the impression that the community of home PCs listens to slashdot users and follows what the geeks say. If that were the case we really would have the year of the linux desktop, as software developers rush to get their software compatible with linux. Or the common user does not pay attention to the geeks, but rather has a bias towards what is familiar to them and gets in the way the least. win 7, was familiar to the common users, programs opened more or less identically to how they did on windows XP, or if they were unlucky, vista while they had it. The average joe does not pay attention to slash dot banter, or ask the geek down the street or do any research, they walk into best buy, ask the geek squad what he recomends, tests the floor model to see how fast facebook loads on the 1,500 dollar computer they were recomended and consideres that full research. When they do the facebook checking stage, and it isn't identical to what they are used to, they freak out and exclaim how much they hate the new operating system.

Historically speaking, google is one of the least likely companies to actually sue using their patents compared to any other large company. Barring situations in which someone else is already suing them over a stupid patent, and them pulling one out to say OK you are infringing on X call it even. Not saying they are perfect, but within the industries they are fighting in, google is usually the least retarted about patents.

right, but that's the thing. Humans do have to commit some extent of the tables etc... into their memories, How much space humans can devote to it, of course varies human to human, but saying a human can use them, and a computer can't would be hypocritical. Unless we can quantify exactly how many tables the grandmaster has memorized, and forced the computer to use that exact quantity.

I'd have to fully agree with you. Nintendo's stregnth has more or less always been creating a new technology for a console, and then tossing out a line of first party titles to demonstrate how to proporly utilize the technology. Quite simply I do have to say it is very probable that in the event that they do not produce the gadgets, their games will lose their appeal, as you mentioned, sega is a pretty clear demonstration of what could happen to nintendo. Sega went from an era of which the dreamcast was worth the purchase for many, even with pretty much nothing but sega's first party titles to show for it (yes the dreamcast sold poorly, but I would say few if any who purchased it, felt it was a bad purchase). To the sega of today, in which the only ones of their games that are even worth purchasing, are the re-released dreamcast games. With that I must say I really don't want to see nintendo go that route. Your insights make sense though, if nintendo did something like create the wiimote for the PS3, have the hardware bundled with super mario galaxy etc... (this is a time travel hypothetical scenerio, if the wii never existed, then there wouldn't be a move), That may have been a functional direction to go, and perhaps similar could happen. Nintendo would need to produce just enough "hardware" to keep the developers feeling as they are developing on their own territory.

It all depends on the bias of the teacher... in america, something like 40% believe in a litteral 6 day creation less than 10,000 years ago. Those numbers aren't significantly different in grade school or high school teachers. There are schools in america right now that flat out don't teach evolution... They skim by it on the day... say "ok class, if you want to read up on evolution it's on page x-y on your text book... I will not test you on it just check the box saying you read it and you are golden.

I myself was raised creationist.... when you actually hear the creationist arguements etc... as a 4th grader, they actually sound pretty logical. They really take about a high school level education to see through, and I never really confronted the facts again after 4th grade, it wasn't until I was in my 20's that I looked back and realized how much bull it was.

I've seen this one several times... one thing truely lacking... any comment or response or acceptance of the debate from Bill Nye. The appropriate headline is "Ken Ham opens doors for debate against Bill Nye". Now odds are IMO Bill shouldn't or won't agree to this debate without first and foremost... getting his own crew in there to record and have the interview posted in it's entirety (ham is basically setting this debate up in his own turf... no information for his moderator choice etc.... Ken Ham is quite likely to basically have this happen on his stage... post the video to youtube edited and butchered to make it look like Nye couldn't answer his questions, or have a moderator or any other means to prevent Nye from speaking. Odds are Ken Ham will not allow Bill Nye to debate in a form that Bill Nye can actually teach the audience. Ken Ham is going to set himself a win/win situation... Nye attends, Ham chops and edits the only permitted footage so it looks like Nye lost. Nye requests independant recording etc... ham will refuse that in his museum. Nye refuses, Ham will boast of how Bill Nye is afraid to debate a real creationist.

"failure to file tax returns"

Just being a person doesn't mean you can go to prison, just ask Bain capital, or wells fargo, or bank of america, none of those people have faced any jailtime

Of course, I suppose it depends on how much they get on the former slavery lawsuits... if they don't have money... yeah those monkeys will be in jail in hours.

Umm... have you actually read the 10 commandments? and assume they are all towards public good etc? The first 4 of them are entirely meaningless to a non-christian, 6-9 are blatently obvious to any human being regardless of religion, and 5 and 10 have some serious problems.
1. you shall have no other gods before me
yeah... I don't think that one quite fits a secular government like the united states
2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
yeah same problem here
3. Don't take the lords name in vain
Uhh.... ok still haven't gotten to anything about the good of humans yet
4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy
Are we seeing a pattern here yet?
5. Honour thy father and thy mother
woo half way through and one with moderate secular value... though also pretty terrible and lacking nuance... we have child abuse laws on the books for a reason
6, 7, 8, 9, Don't kill, commit adultry, steal or bear false witness
ah finally some good reasonable public good commandments that for the most part, aren't bad... admitted any society that didn't figure these basic ones out on their own... would have died out pretty quickly
10. Don't covet your neighbors wife, servants, donkey or other possesions.
not terrible advice... minus the fact that it is phrased in a way, more or less puts a man's wife, donkey and house, are all more or less in the same category.

and what defines a marriage as a childbearing relationship? Does any specific religion hold the naming rights to marriage? Because I'm pretty certain that weddings in some form or another trace back significantly further than any currently doccumented religions... Or lets just pretend we are using the bible as the definition of marriage. How many concubines are we allowed? Oh and how many wives? Next time we invade a country, can we take some wives home with us as god authorized his people to do (provided of course we give the women a few months to grieve, we aren't monsters). Ah right... god updated his definition of marriage to keep up with the times... but the second time it was perfect?

Marriage has been around, longer than humans have been able to record history, and it has always been changing, Humans have had societies consisting of everything from random sex within a set tribe/city, many forms of polygamy etc... One thing most historians agree on, is that 2 permanantly monogomous people, is a fairly uncommon system (if you are factoring in all of the societies that we have knowledge about over the last 10k years). Giving a different name etc... I don't oppose in theory, except that it almost always follows with giving a weaker or less valuable set of rights