Yeah, and see where that got us. The constitution has 2842 of those words completely ignored. If you want people to follow directions, you have to be verbose.

Heh... I call it fireworks night :).

This is also true in more conventional athletic sports--e.g., tennis. The culture of sexism is so ingrained in the male psyche that most men are completely incapable of detecting sexist behavior, whether in others or themselves; and when confronted, the response is predictably some form of vehement outrage and denial. Some then proceed to shift the blame, claiming that others have been indoctrinated by some militant feminist agenda, or worse yet, a nebulous "political correctness."

I've heard plenty of women talking about the attractiveness of male tennis players, sometimes quite graphically. Do you think that is sexism?

What European league do you think MLS is probably equivalent to? Maybe the French league?

Not a chance... do you know how good PSG are currently?

So there actually are no other leagues/teams that can realistically claim to be world's champions.

Some would beg to differ. Have you seen the USA's record?

If you don't like American football and prefer rugby, that's your business, but rugby is actually a pretty crappy sport. If the US cared about it at all, and we do not, we would own the entire world in the sport.

Hahahahaha... oh wait, you're serious, let me laugh even harder.

Well... not really. The Cambridge Rules were a code of rules for football, which has existed in many forms for centuries (interestingly, illegally, too). Since about the 14th century, "foot ball" and "hand ball" were considered different. The current association football rules are just a set of rules for football, just like the Cambridge rules were. Rugby football is derived from football, as is Association football and American football. The Football Association was founded in 1863, 15 years after the first Cambridge rules, and the Rugby Football Union was founded in 1871, so association football can't really be a ripoff of rugby. That being said, the modern rules for association football are wildly different than many earlier rules, probably, but no one knows because none of the early rules were written down. Not even the first Cambridge rules were written down.

To be honest, I don't care what people call their sports... I call "soccer" "football", because I'm English.

Rendition were never competetive, PowerVR are still about, S3 are still about, Matrox are still about, 3dlabs were not gaming cards. Yeah, ok, I'm stretching a bit ;)

However, if you do include embedded graphics, there are still plenty of players on the market. Also, this market only lasted 2 years or so, and it was a brand new market, so there were bound to be more competitors. Those that did fall out of the market and survived in some form have gone to the embedded market.

It gets WORSE. Now the new consoles are here, each with 8GB of memory, the average amount of GPU memory needed for 1080P or above is about to rise above 2GB for the first time.

Erm... this doesn't even make sense. At all. Are you claiming that to display 1080P you need a graphics card with 2GB onboard? Are you claiming that the new consoles have 8GB GPU RAM? What?

Besides, the amount of onboard RAM has long been an utterly useless metric for determining graphics performance. Since RAM is so cheap, nVidia and ATI often just drop lots on a crappy architecture, and advertise the RAM.

From a marketplace that used to be served by 6 competing vendors into a duopoly marketplace that is currently served by only 2 vendors --- the pace of innovation has slowed to a crawl.

We're most definitely not in a duopoly marketplace at the moment. There are currently only 2 companies offering high performance 3D consumer priced cards, but there are other companies in the graphics business. The most popular graphics card used by people using Steam is the Intel HD Graphics 3000, for example. Matrox is still about, too, but not competing in consumer 3D.

To be honest, I can't really remember a time in which there were more than 3 (possibly 4) major players in the high end consumer 3D market. Matrox dabbled, but never got close to a cost efficient gaming card, really IMO... the closest they came was the G400 IIRC. That was the era when you could possibly claim there were 4 competing vendors. Soon after, Matrox left the market to concentrate on 2D, and 3dfx dissapeared up their own arse. I'm not sure who the other 2 you are alluding to are.... SiS, VIA?

Gee, you don't think it could simply be a case of newsies swinging techies for fun and profit, do you?

After all, techies are educated, so it would be impossible to spin them, wouldn't it?

Of course, CS Levis wrote that it's easier to spin an educated person, possibly iibecause he listens for the key phrases, makes a rash judgement, and then holds onto it with all the wicked ego he's got... until he hears another key phrase.

Table 2: Notifiable offences recorded by the police in which firearms were reported to have been used, by principal weapon

Air weapons; Shotgun; Handgun

1993 6,337 1,592 4,273
1994 7,165 1,190 3,087
1995 7,568 983 3,319
1996 7,813 933 3,347
1997 7,506 580 2,648

Handguns banned this year, no legislation change with regards to shotguns or Air weapons, AFAIK

1997/98 7,902 565 2,636
1998/99 8,665 642 2,687
1999/00 10,103 693 3,685
2000/01 10,227 608 4,110
2001/02 12,377 712 5,874
2002/03 13,822 672 5,549
2003/04 13,756 718 5,144
2004/05 11,825 597 4,360
2005/06 10,439 642 4,672
2006/07 8,836 612 4,173
2007/08 7,478 602 4,172
2008/09 6,041 618 4,274
2009/10 4,925 584 3,743
2010/11 4,203 608 3,105

Handgun offences had dropped by more than a third in the 5 years prior to them being banned, then doubled in the 5 years after the ban. They have since dropped to levels about a quarter higher than they were when they were banned.

Shotgun offences had dropped by about 2/3 in the 5 years prior to the handgun ban, then increased slightly, then decreased slightly. They have since dropped to levels almost identical to when the handgun ban took effect.

Airgun offences were gradually rising prior to the handgun ban, rose quickly in the aftermath of the ban, then dropped by more than 2/3rds in the last 8 years to levels well below when the handgun ban took effect.

So you see, offences with both the types of gun that weren't banned have stayed the same or gone down overall, and offences with the type of gun that was banned have gone up. This is pretty clear.

Sadly, It's not about the license fees. It's about using patent portfolios to suppress the competition.

Blackberry's patents are estimated to be worth up to $3 billion. They are also part of Rockstar Constortium Inc., which purchased Nortel's portfolio of over 4000 patents for $4.5 billion in the summer of 2011, and is currently litigating against major Android handset manufacturers.

While some parents home school for worrying religious reasons, I know others who do it because their extremely intelligent children didn't fit in and were bullied at school, or because they school refused to acknowledge cross-gender behavior (Bobby likes dolls, or Suzie likes dump trucks), or because the school was so busy catering to dim-witted dullards that it neglected the problem-free smart kids and left them unchallenged for years on end.

Agreed. Watsa has a good idea what the patent portfolio is worth, and my suspicion is that he's playing a shrewd game. There are only two scenarios: (1) Blackberry pulls a rabbit out of the hat and manages to scratch out a profit as a minor player in the smartphone game, or (2) Blackberry's hardware business collapses and Watsa manages to get his hands on the company's patent portfolio as a discount.