The bad news is that we can't remove your brain tumor.
The absolutely brilliant news is that we've withdrawn the diagnosis. Officially, you have no tumor. Now quit whining and get on with life.

A pill to cure cynicism will cause people to misquote? That is a bad idea!

Cruelty is not something most people have no experience with, it's part of growing up.
You got bullied for wearing glasses, I got crap for having hearing aids, other kids I knew got it because they were fat while others were bullied for being skinny, some were too short, some too tall, some too rich, some too poor, some had permanent snotty noses, one kid got it because his dad was a policeman. It happens to everyone.

The things you've listed as having lost all or part of are lacking in most adults.
Smiling all the time and announcing "Hey, it's tuesday, let's all go to the beach" do not really work beyond the age of puberty.

Are they insane? Yes, they are.
These are the same people who claim that playing TV or radio in public requires a license, even when there is no charge to view or listen, despite that section 72 of the copyright, designs and patents act says otherwise. They then attempt to sue police stations among others for breaking their fictitious interpretation of the law.

You're overlooking something just a little bit obvious.
All the bios passwords in the world wont prevent anything when the battery can just be pulled.

So the correction should read:

I think the fact that tables have been used for many years for layout proves that they may indeed be used for layout :-P

So which part don't you believe? The turning people into salt part, or the invisible being part?

If it's the second, then I'd say the words "we" and "us" are not the words you are looking for and you should maybe look for a new religion that doesn't involve invisible beings.

In small and medium shops, cameras are there to provide evidence to the police after something has happened or so the shopkeeper can see the back of the store. No analysts are required.
In bigger shops, and police/council networks, 1 person may be in charge of upwards of 20 cameras.

Not only is it not logistically impossible to have millions of cameras in the UK, but even the CCTV User Group says there's more than 1.5 million not including corner shops. All the takeaways on my road have at least 2, one corner shop has 3 and the other has at least 5. Those numbers add up.

As for the comment that anyone who doesn't want cameras everywhere has never lived in a bad neighbourhood, being mugged once when you were 9 in an "upper middle class" area is classed as bad? Personally, I've been stabbed, beaten with a baseball bat and seen my block of flats set on fire in the past few years. This area is nowhere near as bad as where I grew up. There, being mugged as a child was a weekly occurence.
Funnily enough though, I still don't like having CCTV record my every move. Maybe it's because CCTV does not prevent crime and is easily defeated with a hood or bandana. Or maybe it's because of the slippery slope. Something happens outside of CCTV coverage, then CCTV must be placed there. Eventually there is not a single inch of private space left in the country.

The article says that it was published by Elsevier. If they were just a printing company, I'd agree with you, but they are claiming to be more than that.
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/ataglance

And from http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/mission:

At best, they were duped into lending any credibility they have to a sham. At worst, they knew that the thing was fake and went against their mission statement, yet published anyway because the money was too good to pass up.

It's perfectly sensible in the same way that describing Demigod as a game for rapists is. After all, the dictionary definition of rape includes "violent seizure", and the definition of a rapist is one who commits rape.
If someone said "if you play Demigod, accept that you're a rapist and quit rationalizing it any other way.", would that be acceptable or sensible to you?

The word "rapist" is generally reserved for those who commit the other type of rape, the one described in legal dictionaries as forced sexual relations. Just as the word "thief" is not generally used to describe someone winning a game through luck, or moving stealthily but is used to describe those who deprive someone of their own property.

Because you seem to have missed part of definition 3, here's the full quote:

I can't remember the last time I saw somebody in court charged with theft of a girlfriend (outside of Suadi or Iran). Nor can I remember any arrests under the definition of "to move, bring, convey, or put secretly or quietly", for gaining a point in a game through strategy, chance or luck, or for "stealing" attention.

Maybe that's because the definitions used in law are not the same as those used in the dictionary. If they were, we could accuse Brad Wardell of being a murderer because he made a quick profit, which is a definition of killing from dictionary.com

The word under discussion is not "steal" though, but "thief". http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Thief

Look up both larceny and theft there, and you'll see they involve the taking of property. Making a copy of something does not involve removal of the original from the owners possesion.
On the same subject, making a copy does not involve "copyright theft", unless you happen to have taken away the rights of the creator. The way big studios use hollywood accounting to swindle writers for instance.

This does leave a slight problem for people who like to rant about piracy though.

doesn't sound quite as good as calling people thieves.

My kids "born with a keyboard in their hands" love to play old Genesis/Mega Drive games and flash based games (on a 1GHz P3) and PS2 games. They want the same thing from their games as I do from mine, and it's not the latest, ultra-realistic graphics. It's decent gameplay. That doesn't always need the fastest hardware.

The PS2 has a clock speed of under 300MHz on the CPU, the Nintendo DS has 2 processors running at 67 and 33MHz. Even the wii is under 800MHz with 88MB of RAM. None of that prevents good games being written for those systems.

Turns out this is a moot point. Their usage of the word "online" turns out not to mean people playing online, but simple update checks.

In the UK we have the Theft Act 1978 which defines obtaining services by deception as theft. There's probably similar in other countries.
While I agree that having a copy of the game is not theft, obtaining the service from the servers could be.

There is the counter argument though that the act (in the UK at least) requires there to be an understanding that the service has been or will be paid for. If the company knows which copies are pirated then there is no expectation of payment on their part.