A chair is as comfy as a sofa, unless you have a very wide butt.

Only children and people with very wide butts play games in the living room. Proper adult gamers sit at a desk.

No shit?

How'd you remember the PW? :-)

The brain responds to challenges to closely-held beliefs the same way it does to mortal fear of death. You're not going to make any progress using logic here.

Smitty believes that anyone who isn't a conservative is a Democrat and all Democrats support Obamacare. He believes Obama is a "leftist" and anyone who doesn't believe the way he does is a "leftist" and that the two poles of the political divide are "Left" and "Right". He hasn't figured out yet that the divide is really "Top" and "Bottom".

Even if you could penetrate the quasi-religious certainty in his world-view, I'm not sure it would be safe to do so except in a therapeutic environment.

A free thinker. Which means I will perform thought experiments, with assumed values that are contrary to my observation or bias, and see where that leads. Often an otherwise undiscovered insight or new set of observable conditions can arise - to be confirmed with primary documentary sources.

One thing I can assure you - the USA is no inherently or morally "better" than Russia. Their murdered millions were mostly within the borders of their assumed territory. US's are continual, in secondary economic fiefdoms.

Valve has to make the same choices regarding price and hardware tradeoffs.

Yes, but remember, the PC gaming market has already shown a willingness to pay more than twice the cost of a next-gen console for a really kick-ass gaming experience.

The key to Valve's success with its Steam Box, IMO, is to keep in mind that PC gamers are a very different market than console gamers. And, they have more money to spend. If they try to position Steam Box as nothing more than a direct competitor to consoles, they will fail.

I'm already putting together a Steam Box that's going to end up costing about 4 times what a next-gen console goes for. A few more bucks for a groundbreaking controller is not a big deal.

Having said all that, I'm not sure a touchscreen in a controller is a good idea. Maybe just a simple touchpad, but a full-blown touch display would make the controller too delicate for me. My controller takes a fair amount of abuse. And I don't want to have to look at the controller at any time.;

How do you think I get my weed?

He's a third generation fascist terrorist.

Sailing is practically free transportation. The adjustment of the sails can be automated so a single human operator can run the whole ship.

And poor people, after the global economic collapse, are going to buy that automated sailing ship how again?

Most people don't see the flaw in thinking that they're going to weather the coming social breakdown because they have a high limit on their Visa card.

Diego Garcia

Plane is now here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/DiegoGarcia1.png

There's some nice places, all down the road. Over Turk Kabobs, and Tabacs.

"We already had a nigra. Aftah that, some Jew bwah ain't so bad, now."

There are no terrorists. They are as fictional - in EVERY sense, as the "terrorists" in the movie "Brazil".

But?

Edward Snowden is definitely a "Harry Tuttle".

Russia has a SOF agreement with Ukraine as a part of the Sevastapol lease agreement - good well past a 2017 renewal. It allows for 35,000 Russian Troops in Crimea. The Russians are legally in Crimea under the same kind of frameworks that legally allow US troops in Bhagram, Afghanistan.

The Crimean referendum is being conducted under the precedent most recently, of Kosovo and South Sudan.

Good for the goose? Good for the gander.

OPERATION PAPERCLIP

"To circumvent President Truman's anti-Nazi order and the Allied Potsdam and Yalta agreements, the JIOA worked independently to create false employment and political biographies for the scientists. The JIOA also expunged from the public record the scientists' Nazi Party memberships and régime affiliations. Once "bleached" of their Nazism, the scientists were granted security clearances by the U.S. government to work in the United States. Paperclip, the project's operational name, derived from the paperclips used to attach the scientists' new political personae to their "US Government Scientist" JIOA personnel files."

* Otto Ambros was a Third Reich chemist who served as director of the German corporation that produced the gas used in the death camps. He was tried at Nuremberg, found guilty of mass murder, and sentenced to eight years. While he was serving time in prison, Operation Paperclip officials arranged for his sentence to be commuted. In 1951, Ambros was hired to work at a clandestine facility north of Frankfurt called Camp King. His work, sanctioned by the Defense Department, ultimately involved the testing of sarin toxins on American soldiers without their knowledge.

* Arthur Rudolph was a Nazi rocket scientist who played a key role in the V-2 rocket program. One of Operation Paperclip's earliest hires, Rudolph, in the U.S., worked his way up through the ranks of NASA to become project director of the Saturn V rocket program. Ultimately, Rudolph was led to confess to war crimes, but his work is all over the U.S. aeronautics technology.

* Kurt Blome, a virologist, pioneered Hitler's secret germ warfare program. Specializing in plague research, Blome conducted human tests on concentration camp prisoners and was a defendant at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial. Acquitted, Blome was instrumental in the U.S. germ warfare program.

* Kurt Debus was a V-weapons engineer who oversaw mobile rocket launches at Peenemunde. An ardent Nazi, he wore the SS uniform to work and after Paperclip, became the first director of NASA's JFK Space Center in Florida.

* Hubertus Strughold was in charge of the aviation research in the Reich Ministry and despite his war crimes was hired by the Americans to eventually become America's father of Space Medicine.

The notorious CIA interrogation techniques and other mind-control programs and projects had their beginnings in a camp near Franfurt called Camp King. It was there where Operation Bluebird experiments involving LSD and other drugs started with Paperclip personnel and research.

The US Army's herbicidal warfare program during the Vietnam War, in which 11.4 million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed over more than 24 percent of South Vietnam was the brainchild of Fritz Hoffmann, another Nazi war criminal.