I love it how the know-it-alls jump and say "no, CSS/ads/JavaScript/AJAX/ is guilty". Timothy's post claims an observed twofold increase in speed in practice. Unless you want to flat-out say that he is lying, your arguments are invalid.

I like to use this, please don't laugh, I am an electronics novice. http://www.falstad.com/circuit/ It may be too simplistic to warrant being mentioned along the likes of OrCad, Spice, etc. but boy, does it help build intuition!

Pardon me, there is private property in communism. Name one country in the past or present where you don't own the bread you eat (once you were given it). Similarly, in capitalism, you don't own your salary until you've received your paycheck, so try to find your way around that.

P.S. If you do, I'm your loyal worshipper :)

It humors me greatly to see the amount of energy and the number of words people in the States need to spend in order to mention anything that has to do with "communism" while not bashing it at the same time.

If you want good randomness: buy a cheap microcontroller, one thermistor, one photoresistor, hook it all up to the charger of your old cell phone (or power from USB but then there's not much noise) and sample away. Or alternatively just grab that Brownian motion detector.

Cannibalism. Homosexuality. Abortion. Incest. Animals do it, humans do it; those are Mother Nature's inventions, and who are we to try and remove them from the natural order of things? I call for an international effort to form ARCHAIC (Advisory and Regulatory body for the Conservation of Homosexuality, Abortion, Incest and Cannibalism)!

Srsly now, you guys in funny skirts, let's stop pretending like you are above the Nature and stop destroying its fine inventions. =)

Video games are subject to a number of balance issues from which traditional games have largely stayed free. It can be hard finding players of comparable skill-level to create even match-ups, [...]

Author obviously never played basketball with his friends.

[...] diverse gameplay options can quickly become irrelevant if someone finds a broken feature that beats everything else [...]

You mean this?

[...] and some online games make your ability to play competitively a question of how much time and money you've invested in a game, rather than the skill you possess.

Time spent training is a large factor, if not the largest, in attaining a high level of skill. Good equipment helps in real-life games and sports, too. Some even insist that shell and slate stones make them play better go. Go figure. :)

Many in the security industry praised him as a smart pick, [...]

Did anyone else misread this as "smart prick"?

You can set up a *NIX box as your mail server with procmail handling the mail to a dedicated user account. Set up a procmail rule to act on the messages with the subject, say, "Simon says *insert_your_verification_token_here*" and sender's e-mail address matching that of yours. The body can be fed to anything, including bash, and results e-mailed back to you. But keep in mind that this solution isn't the most secure thing in the world :)

Iridium is extremely rare on Earth, and the high concentration of it at the K-T boundary in the Earth's crust is what suggests a meteor took out the dinosaurs. I am positive that the symbolism of the permanence of Iridium, the reminder that we are star-stuff, and the fact that the ring would be one-of-a-kind would really strike a chord with my girlfriend.

Marry me!