People seem to confuse the Law with Morality and Justice a lot. Laws are not always Just or Moral. Following the Law isn't always the Moral or Just thing to do. Where is the morality in allowing someone to die because you're not legally obligated to help them? Where is the justice in laws that allow you to manipulate and steal from other people? Laws are just rules which the people in power at any given point in time have decided to set for people to follow. It is up to individuals to decide which laws should and should not be followed. If the government makes a law that makes it legal to kill someone, that doesn't make it Moral, Just, or even right. History has many examples of Unjust laws that people followed, many laws are made to be broken by people because they are badly written legislation. People who fail to understand these concepts usually end up being the patsies who wonder how Hitler, Stalin, and Mao got into power, and how did the country go so wrong? The answers are pretty simple. Not every Law should be followed. Not every criminal branded as such by the state is a bad person out to do you harm.

I like nuclear technology a lot. A lot. But I don't think we should be using it for electricity generation, Why? Because when we leave this little ball to explore the universe, we are going to be travelling far away from our star. Batteries aren't going to be enough. Solar won't cut it. We'll need a stable energy source that can last millenia to power our ships through the galaxy and only nuclear is capable of it. Should we really be rushing to burn all of that non-renewable fuel for tasks which frankly prudent use of solar salt thermal generators can accomplish the same ends? Not to mention that digging nuclear materials out of the ground still involves mining/consuming a raw material for energy and at some point that energy source will run out. Nuclear is no cure for our long term energy needs, it'll just result in a new energy crisis when all the easily available uranium/thorium is expended. It's time some truly long term planning was actually used by governments.

Valve need to be able to back this up with ID Software/Epic games on the linux version. If the Linux native quake 1/2/3/4, Doom 1/2/3, Wolfenstein/RTCW games are available on steam, along with UT2k3/UT2k4/UT99 that would be a much better incentive for people to join the store. Source engine games are awesome. But as a Mac gamer I was very disappointed to see that half the games that have native ports, aren't available on the store for mac. I know Aspyr were trying to launch their own terrible competing service. I hope the Linux Steam system can dodge those issues since most linux ports of games are done in-house, or by Ryan "Icculus" Gordon. Also, it'd be nice to see some of the DOSBox game releases on Steam appear on linux. It's not that hard to setup dosbox for Linux, and all those titles run fine. Ultimately Steam on Linux can only be a good thing, I hope that it will finally goad Blizzard into action on its Linux offerings.

Virtual Machines are still not an answer, not yet anyway. Until there's a Voodoo 2 gpu emulator in the virtual machine that handles directx 1-7, opengl 1.2 and Glide. Old applications simply will not all run. Win9x doesn't work properly in virtual machines even now 15 years on. You still can't play Warhammer Dark Omen with all it's options just like a bare metal Pentium 2 running windows 98 with a Voodoo card can. This is a hurdle that honestly should have been fixed years ago. Wine has the same problem. There are many old applications it doesn't support because they never finished Directx 1-7 support. http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectX-ToDo. Until they get graphics cards properly working in virtual machines it's not ready to be used. Gallium3D is going to make linux able to run Directx 10/11 applications work in virtual machines by directly forwarding commands from the virtual machine to the graphics card, but there are at this stage AFAIK no plans to support older titles. The closest thing I've seen around is Dosbox has some voodoo 2 patches but they're very unsupported, you can't just apt-get install dosbox-voodoo and get a working install at this stage. Also running windows 9x while patchable, is unsupported by Dosbox at this stage. It would be nice if virtualbox would pick up some of this work to fix gpu support. But I suspect noone is interested in making old software work :(

Any of the Wing Commander novels are a great light read especially if you are into heroic characters and fleet actions. The entire book series is great reading for any fan of space opera.

Christopher Stasheff, A Wizard in Rhyme series. It was funny and amazing. An english lit professor gets transported to alternate world Europe where spells are cast by rhyming, and where damning someone to hell literally opens a portal and summons a demon. It was a brilliant series. Hillarious to read.

For me the problem with this is the $1500 of games I've invested into the PS3 platform. I was hoping that PS4 would be an upclocked Cell cpu with more cores and faster video so it would enable PS3 games to still run, and be fast enough to emulate PS2 games. If sony drop backwards compatibility altogether I might skip PS4 and go back to PC gaming. There's not much point to buying x86 console hardware if I can buy an i7 and have someone crack the architecture of the console.

I've bought more legitimate games for my PS3 than any other system. Want to know the secret? I pay $25.00-$50 per game. They ship from the UK, from OZGameShop.com There's no DRM, there's no bullshit. I put them in my PS3, they install, and they play. I don't have to be online to use them. I own 26 Playstation 3 games, I even preordered 2 of them and paid full price $70-100. That's more than every other console I own combined. If you try to force me to pay $60-120/game. I will stop buying games again. You will have priced me out of the market. I will prefer to spend my $500 on PC hardware, and crack your software. Because I can't justify YOUR prices. There's a point where buying a game is a good honest deal and I will buy many games. But then there's the point where you're ripping me off blind, and I will stop buying your products. It's your choice really. I pay well above average for the humble bundles as well. My first payment was $35 because I saw the value of what they wanted to sell. I wouldn't own any PS3 games or even a PS3 if I couldn't get the games I want for $25 each. You wouldn't have 29 sales of games, hardware, and controllers without that available. That's about $1200 Sony and it's publishers would be missing. Don't screw over gamers, and we won't screw you over. Stop acting like entitled children. You don't own our money and we don't owe you anything.

You can't dodge a high tax rate when you're dead. Something to think about.... Americans place too high a value on money.

and so it begins... the complete elimination of human labor by the upper classes. So once agriculture and mining are completely automated (and they will be, just wait until we have robots to haul off broken/malfunctioning ones for recycle/repair.) and they've automated all manufacturing (see Foxconn in China) How long will it take for people to get fedup with 1% of the population controlling all the resources leaving everyone else with nothing? If food, mineral and energy production can all be automated why should any of us have to work to live? I'm sure someone will come up with some religious/moral BS as to why we should work. There needs to be a societal overhaul if these technologies do end up being viable. Communism didn't work when you had to wait 5 years to get a car, but if that same car can be built in 30 mins by robots, using resources mined by robots, should anyone really have to go without a car?