This is a group of tech industry veterans, conditioned by years of D&D.

Everyone knows that NPCs don't hear you unless addressed directly. The party discusses their options, and then the character with the highest charisma conveys the group's chosen statement.

The question of 'Do I or do I not want to know how I'll die?' is explored very interestingly in the collection of fictional short stories 'Machine of Death'

Can be read for free here: http://machineofdeath.net/ebook

Oculus Rift is going to be asking you to push dual monitors at 60 fps with VSync enabled at whatever resolution they settle on. That's difficult for many cards today.

I don't think it matters any more. Pre-9/11 thinking was that if the plane gets hijacked, let them fly us to Egypt where we'll be hostage for a few days until the US caves to their demands or Rainbow Six (or whoever) shoots them.

Post-9/11 thinking is that if the plane gets hijacked, the pilot is still not going to open his vault doors, and enough of the passengers are willing to risk a real or imagined knife to beat the stuffing out of you.

Even though I don't think it matters any more, doesn't mean that the TSA has figured it out though.

With 'good-enough' integrated video currently shipping on current-gen Intel processors, I think we'll start seeing laptops that can dock onto an external high end video card.

When you're on the go you've got your small-time games and traditional laptop full of movies or term papers or whatever.

When you dock it at home you've now got the horsepower to play graphically intensive games without the full additional price or mental juggling of a second gaming PC.

The issue here is that technology has progressed to a point that we're discovering that it's possible to have a situation that's never been a problem before.

If you look at the warrant process, it's attempting to keep the government from messing with you unless they have 'a good reason'. Having a detective follow a suspect around to see what they do has, up until now, been naturally limited by funding and manpower to cases where the police had 'a good reason', and so we've never had to make up external limits on the activity.

As police activity becomes less and less limited by funding and manpower, we have to check if we need to start imposing outside limitations instead.

Daylight Savings Time is like chopping off your head and standing on it to make yourself taller.

Linked article does not substantiate your claim that Aaron Tilton and his gang of eco-thugs have LDS Church endorsement.

Citation Needed.

It's a tangent, but there's a good article on 2008 rice prices freaking out because of the same effect: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2011/11/02/141771712/how-fear-drove-world-rice-markets-insane

Short version is that in a normal environment there is enough rice produced for everyone, but suddenly everyone worries that RIGHT NOW they need to buy all the rice they will eat ALL YEAR, and that causes problems.

The solution was really interesting too. Turns out that Japan artificially insulates it's rice farmers from foreign competition, but to satisfy world trade agreements they buy lots of rice that sits in warehouses and rots. People started negotiations to re-export that rice to countries with a shortfall, and as soon as the word got around that this might happen people went back to normal buying behavior and the problem evaporated without actually moving anything around.

And they did it with a lemon! They got their engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burned his house down!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mUC-262Xr4

Tim Samaras is a storm researcher who has captured lightning strikes at 10,000 frames per second:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyUsjsJ-E0c

It's not 1,000,000,000,000 FPS, but it's still pretty cool.

I'm curious why you think the judge would be an idiot to sign such a warrant?

I thought warrants were to keep police from going on fishing expeditions where they just show up at your house and look for something, anything, to bust you for. Demonstrating that someone at that address connected to a tracker, requested a block, and now they'd like legally seize the computer to see if the block arrived seems like the iconic use of a warrant.

I can't offer a source (sorry), but I was listening to this podcast on criminal justice a few years ago, and they talked about it being semi-common in Japan for the Yakuza to assassinate their own members in prison. It wasn't because they were afraid the guy would rat them out, it was because he was just a low level employee that they didn't feel like they owed very much to, and it was cheaper to pay for him to be killed then to be obligated to pay his retirement when he got out.

I wonder if that ever happens stateside.