More like Hockey in the US or Football in Canada?

Yeah, in 2015. Unless you imagined us sending those astronauts to the ISS on the last shuttle and then leaving them there until Orion comes along, I don't see how canceling constellation makes a difference. NASA would've had to buy those flights anyway.

Sorry, no, it's not. Fox, too, ran their daily "Bush, great president or the greatest?" segments and called anyone who didn't agree with him a freedom hating traitor.

Msnbc then started to notice that there was a market for a FoxNews of the Left, Olbermann got his daily pseudo-intellectual vitriolic rants and everything else followed.

All they did after the election was to switch roles.

If a patent troll sues over Theora there will just be an inofficial hack job of html5 to enable other codecs. Code is cheap, browsers are free and everything that renders that web page already supports h.264 anyway. For h.264, take the largest 50 electronics corporations. Every one of those either produces a chip that decodes h.264 in hardware or sells a device that includes such a chip.

They have a vested interest in h.264 and if something threatens the core of the standard, *cough* The Thousand Corporations of the MPEG LA Descend Upon You. Their Lawyers Will Blot Out the Sun. *cough*

You take a couple of events and turn them into a jumbled mass of fail.

By which you mean annulling Henry VIII's marriage and allowing him to appropriate church assets worth billions of (present day) pounds?

Ditto for CPUs: Best Gaming CPUs For The Money

Not to mention that you can still use most of that land.

I don't doubt that. I just think that the situation's better than on the PC. Even if it's just because torrents for the Mac versions will be harder to come by.

Piracy rates on the PC are so bad that even slightly better rates on the Mac would make quite a difference. IIRC Paradox Interactive estimated from the number of people downloading patches and their statistics on how often the average registered user downloads a patch that more than 90% of the copies were illegal. And Europa Universalis's audience is probably less likely to pirate it than that of Close Range. (Although that's just a guess)

What exactly are you doubting?

That the Mac's share now's bigger than 10 years ago? That there's more netbooks now than 10 years ago? That more than half of PCs ship with Intel integrated graphics?

Of course hardcore gamers don't use Macs. Where did I even imply that? But MS's busy killing the gaming market. It only makes sense that PC oriented developers like Valve would look for other options. Most Macs should be able to run the Source engine; it's scalable and Apple doesn't use Intel integrated crap across the board. The question's whether Mac people want games on their computers, but I'm sure Valve looked into that beforehand.

I think you're gonna see a lot more of it for a number of reasons.

First, Microsoft fucked up the PC as a gaming platform. The lack of interest, investment, the Games for Windows fuck-up, MS execs admitting that they deliberately don't release games for the PC to prop up the Xbox. Blizzard complained publicly but others can see the writing on the wall, too.

Second, piracy is a real problem on the PC. Ubisoft did experiment with no DRM at all; that they came up with the total fubar they use now, should tell you how that experiment went. Apple users otoh are more likely to have more money than time.

Third, Apple's market share's been increasing while the share of PC's who can run games has been decreasing. Compared to ten years ago MS lost the top end to Apple, the bottom end to netbooks and most of the middle's running intel integrated crap.

Perhaps I'm naive but I always thought NASA should look into building a Orion+Escape System combination that can abort safely in just about any circumstances. That way you could just take any launcher with the necessary payload and a proven track record and put Orion on top of it without all the man-rating bruahaha.

The author talks about the benefits of high population density at all income levels. City dwellers use less resources than people in rural areas.

No one wants to live in a slum... except the millions of people moving from rural areas into slums every year. They're not all completely ignorant, it's just that the countryside around the city is even more of a hellhole than the slums. Thinking used to be that that wave of migration should be stopped at all costs but that has changed and in many country it's now policy to try and improve the situation in the slums instead. That's because planners have come to realize that by and large urban poverty's better than rural poverty. Education, sanitation, health, social mobility, environmental footprint, cities are superior to villages in almost every way.

I don't know where everyone got the idea that the author recommends that we turn regular cities into slums or that everyone should be poor. 90% of the upvoted comments are variations on "omg he sezs we should all live in slums. the author should try living in one, kthxbye." I haven't seen so many burning strawmen outside a Microsoft article in years.

P.S.: The only valid argument I could find in 10 pages was about transport costs but it still is wrong. Yes, transporting food costs energy. But it's not much. When people talk about local food in rich countries they aren't talking about growing vegetables on your roof. The problem is that vegetables from Virginia are shipped to Thailand for processing and then shipped back to Maryland.