It's hard to predict what would happen if MS went with the cheap low tech Nintendo style option, but I don't think that's going to happen.

My prediction is that Sony wins this next generation handily. With the current generation, the PS3 came out a year later, at a significantly higher cost, but was still comparable in hardware specs. It was also much harder to develop for. Despite this, on average it's been outselling the 360 slightly and has nearly caught up to the 360.

In the upcoming generation, they won't have an expensive new optical format to jack up the price, and they're not letting MS get a full year's headstart on them. The prices should be close, especially since the release seems to time pretty well for the yen collapsing back to more traditional levels. And if anything, Sony may beat MS to the market. They've also built it from the ground up to be much easier to program for.

Any final analysis will depend on what MS has to show off, but every dynamic shift from the last generation I can see looks to favor Sony.

We got most of our calories from going into McDonalds, claiming we just went through the drive through and asking for more ketchup packets.

It's a self-driving car. It could take itself to the dealer for maintenance. (Granted that won't help with the ice on the sensors thing, but we'll have some time to figure out a heating system to melt that off.)

Exactly. It's a highly valuable resource and something for which there's a strong argument to get to as many people as possible. But I wouldn't go so far as to consider it a basic human right.

In the US the rules regarding whether bicycles are allowed on sidewalks is generally determined by localities, although I'm sure there are some state level laws as well. Where I grew up, it was legal, and in fact was how I was taught to ride whenever there was a sidewalk to use. Of course whenever you came upon a pedestrian, you were supposed to hop off and walk your bike past them.

That wouldn't work in an area with heavy pedestrian traffic, but as spread out as things were where I lived, you didn't have to hop down very often. I don't have any studies, but I'd wager that is safer than biking on the road, even if it can end up being much slower and more troublesome depending on how many people there are, and completely pointless to even bring the bike in a major city.

I used to bike to town back before I went off to college all the time despite living in the middle of nowhere. It was about an hour trip by bike and very hilly. Sometimes I'd even hike it. Yet now I would never consider biking or walking to work, despite it being less than a quarter of the distance. In the middle of nowhere, you'd occasionally see a car and there'd be plenty of room as the two of you split the road. Now, there's simply far too many and I'm not about to share the road with them.

If they had an unbroken chain of sidewalk and/or bike lanes, I would gladly skip the car whenever the weather is nice. It's not helmets for me, but infrastructure that keeps me from biking. Legal or not, I will not bike on a busy road and I prefer not to walk along it either if I can at all avoid it. So until and unless they fix that, I'll drive 8 minutes to work every day.

Heh, true enough. I'm 6'1" which makes me fairly comfortable with my weight.

Who would want to eat five apples in one sitting? Even if I were hungry, I'd probably just stop at one and wait till the next meal. At least pick a more appealing fruit like an orange.

But seriously, I dropped from 205 pounds to 170 and have kept it off for years with virtually exercise and with the only change to what I'm consuming being that I never buy any beverages with calories. Mostly stick to water with some diet pop on occasion. Other than that, I just cut back portions and eliminated snacking between meals.

Funny thing is, I motivate myself to diet with food. I have a very strict rule that I never eat out/order in unless I'm below 170 pounds. Then I'll get whatever food I want and have one meal where I eat without restraint. After that, I have to diet off whatever I gained and repeat the process. Keeps me happy, and sure beats going vegetarian and/or spending hours a week in the gym.

To be fair, if you took a human, and gave them immortality,a blank universe, and godlike powers in it, how many would start with a big bang and sit around waiting for billions of years to see what happened? They'd just jump ahead. Most humans that wanted to play around would start with civilization already existing including a history that never actually occurred. The same thing happens in novels and other narratives. Why would it actually existing change anything?

Not only would I not find at all odd for records to exist that would indicate a past that never actually occurred, I would expect it from any godlike being with thought processes that at all mimicked those of humans. (Or I suppose it would be human thought processes mimicking their creator in this case.)

I was going to say the same thing only suggesting email rather than twitter. Just let people sign up for an email notification. Anyone with a smart phone is going to get emails from it, and hey, they now have a list of people to advertise to if they so wish. No need to design any special app.

Except the paper isn't trying to disprove that their has been a warming trend, only showing that in the US at least, that trend has been exaggerated. Satellite evidence may actually support that fact. Here are the trends for surface based measurements, and two satellite measurements since 1979.

RSS +0.137 C/decade.
UAH +0.136C/decade
Surface Temperatures +0.17 C/decade

That's 24% more warming in the surface data sets. In addition, both satellite records show 1998 being the hottest year since modern records began, while the surface temperature records show several years since than being hotter. Now the paper calls for a much larger bias in the trend, but not on the global level. So without looking at any of the data, it's at least a plausible conclusion that a much more highly inaccurate US data set could be responsible for most of the global difference from the satellite record.

Did you read the entire article? Because if you continue on, you'll find this:

Well in my mind there's no question that tobacco is far worse than marjiuana, claiming there's no bad side effects at all is always a risky claim to make. There have been studies that indicate that's not the case as it leads to increased risk of schizophrenia, especially when used by adolescents.

I'm not even claiming that's a strong enough reason to keep it banned, just that there are bad side effects.

Skimming the article, it doesn't even seem they considered a very real possibility. That political bias doesn't affect how people perceive temperature, but that people tend to answer polls in a way that reflects well on their personal beliefs even if they know that answer isn't entirely truthful.

I strongly agree with this, even though I know they'll do their best to keep anyone but the actual voter from being able to confirm. For the same reasons people fear electronic voting with no paper trail is too is a security flaw that will lead to fraud, I feel that any system that allows confirmation will eventually lead to some people's votes being discovered by those who shouldn't have access to them.

And let's face it, any election that can have the result changed by fraud without it immediately being obvious that it was crooked was very close to begin with. I'm not so worried that someone who should have lost 46% to 49% wins the race as I am that the secret ballot is compromised. The secret nature of the ballot is one of the primary aspects of democracy that I feel must be protected at all costs. So I am strongly against ever implementing anything of the sort.