Gee, thanks for the spoilers!

Does everything have to tie back to video game design? I think we're being a little one-track-mind here. Sometimes things just are and we'll see what people make of them. This research is so general, one could pose the question "Will directors/writers/teachers/coaches/lawyers use this information to tweak movies/literature/education/sports/representation for gender?"

What about STIGs (http://iase.disa.mil/stigs/stig/index.html)? Complete STIG compliance is a pain in the ass. Bastille Linux (is it dead?) doesn't even get you there half of the way.

0x20 is "space" in ASCII. The ASCII table maps numerical values to (mostly) readable characters. Unicode is a buffed out table supporting international (and other) characters. The programmers forgot to strip the whitespace from their input.

Perhaps, but I would bet the US has the best health care in the world... if you can afford it.

Going against popular perception, defense spending "only" makes up 21% of the national budget (in 2008). 21% was spent on social security and 23% was spent on medicare/medicaid. That is, 45% is going towards the elderly and those in medical need. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget)

With the baby boomers starting to retire, it is inevitable that taxes will be raised to cover them. In my opinion, social security reform is more important that defense spending reform.

Of course many will argue that defense spending gives us products of little worth. However, a good chunk of defense spending goes towards military research and development (science!) which is done by defense contractors, government organizations, and universities. I wonder if Obama plans to include this money in his 3%.

I completely agree. I ran into this when I was working as a software architect on a project that had been around for a while. Contracts were required compiler compatibility instead of standard compatibility. It made updates to the dev environment much more complicated. The contracts should have specified standards, but its writers didn't know any better-- the customer had no need to stick to a compiler product/version. It also makes your code more dependent upon the compiler's quirks. I would mod you up if I had the points.

You're over 15 years too late! See Final Fantasy IV.

What, no spice?