Arabic numerals, arithmetic operators, and all their friends have allowed us to communicate cross-culturally for ages. Also, think of stop signs, bathroom signs, hazard indicators, etc.

There is nothing terribly unique about emoticons.

That's why I shoot deserters.

...are they making an effort to be historically accurate?

I've always liked the Total War series (since Shogun) but must admit to having been caught referring to some of the "history" I learned from the games. Rome:TW is particularly bad in this regard. Granted that the player can drastically alter the outcome of history, for instance by having a massive Portuguese empire take over all of Europe by 1250 A.D., but it would still be nice to be playing with actual historically significant events and persons.

And I have a lot of hope for this one, since a good chunk of it will deal with American history which many of the developers probably know a bit more about than Roman, Japanese, or medieval European history.

Also, I wonder whether we can now start looking forward to, say, Normandy: Total Way, which would be terrifyingly awesome. As the technology has gotten better, the series has tended to move forwards in time, with the exception of Medieval 2 which revisited a time period that had already been covered.

The graphics are slightly shinier?

@SoupGuru: Some things obviously have intrinsic value (e.g. food and water) whereas other things obviously have value assigned to them by different groups (e.g. sports cars). This study had to do with the actual neural response to perceived value, which makes its result non-trivial, regardless of how well it meshes with common-sense.

@Rogerborg: I don't really get what you're calling a "false analogy", but I'm assuming you meant my comparing the parent's attitude to Palin's absurd comments about genetic research on fruit flies, since that was the only analogy employed. And I have some time to kill, so... There is no such thing as a "false analogy", only bad analogies. Analogies can be drawn between any two things that share any similarity, and any two things may share some feature. And any analogy, no matter how good, never lends itself to perfect deductive inference, so that all analogies can be regarded as "logical fallacies". Oh, and by the way, they're called logicians. Oh, and you misspelled "big". Dick.

Damn. I've gone and gotten pedantic on the internets again... stupid alcohol.

Exactly! And while we're being sarcastic, let's chastise all those people who spent years studying fruit flies. This is how science works, buddy. Slow, seemingly insignificant steps following well-established research programs, only some of which possibly lead to larger discoveries in the future.

Picture a graph: the y-axis is popularity (i.e. numbers sold) and the x-axis is products (e.g. each point is a book). If all the most popular products (e.g. Harry Potter) are closer to the y-axis, and as you move away from the y-axis popularity decreases, you get a long tail on the graph.

The idea here is that stocking, e.g., a few copies of a LOT of relatively unpopular books, allows you to cater to niche markets and can significantly increase profits compared to only carrying products that are in high demand.

Companies like Amazon are masters at exploiting the long tail. Oh, and here is the original article describing this idea.

Check out the LaTeX editor. It includes many conveniences, like spell check, thesaurus, word wrapping, etc.

And wouldn't it save vastly more ink if, instead of holes through the letter faces, the font were merely the outline of letters? This is clearly a marketing ploy, just like most new "green" inventions.