In order to provide the most choice, freedom, and protection from consumers, use of Keychest will become mandatory.

Fixed.

People think much too small... unhealthy lifestyles, poor decisions, evil corporations. But what's the cause of it all?

Malthus has the answer... it's a trap. As populations grow they strain limited resources: clean water, quality food, convenient housing, affordable health care. These constraints then start to limit population growth. Lower life expectancies is one small signal that this is happening. People live shorter lives, a net decline in population.

What are large changes in population? Famine, disease, genocide, and WAR. These happen when scarce resources are pushed to their limit. But survivors are joyous when they do, since they have abundant resources left over just for them. Nobody ever has sympathy for the dead.

The last time this happened was WWII. The "good" war was good for the USA because much of it destroyed a large chunk of population in Europe and Asia, leaving the scarce resources for us. I believe this explains most of the good years following the war, up until lately.

I'm hoping they develop more strategy-based multiplayer online games (massive is optional, but you do need a strong online presence to bring a threshold of players together, a la battle.net).

I've been into strategy board games lately, and fantastic new games have come to market the past few years, such as Agricola, Race for the Galaxy, Power Grid, Steam (I could go on). They give me what I like most about gaming: strategic thought to outsmart human opponents with little aspect of luck. There's also a great online community for reviewing and discussing these games at boardgamegeek.com (shameless plug).

The problem with board games is time. With a family and work responsibilities, it's difficult to get together a regular gaming group and play (my wife has limited interest). This is where online computer gaming comes in.

Now I'm not talking about a direct translation of these board games into computer games (there's already a program called VASSAL that does this). Computers handle things like rules and setup (some board games take a long time to put all the chits/counters in place) to make games much more complex than board games can achieve due to these time and space constraints.

I'm really tired of repetitive, click and twitch-fest games of the past. I'm a devoted Blizzard fan boy, but if SC2 plays like SC1 I won't be buying. I'm looking for the next game that really pushes the multi-player strategic boundary.

This is why I use T-Mobile pay as you go plan with my iPhone (off ebay). I pay 10 cents per minute/text message (no data plan, but wi-fi is everywhere I typically go). It costs me around $10 per month.

US consumers are not any more stupid than the rest of the world's consumers. But our pro-business government doesn't protect consumers like in the rest of the world. In the US, cell phone bills are not required to have a line item representing the subsidy for the initial phone purchase. Most other countries do, which lowers bills after the subsidy period expires.

They are new programmers.

If they want to understand the logic of computers, then they should write pseudo code first.

Do this until they are not new programmers.

The money you save by behaving more energy efficient will be used for something else, some other form of consumption. That consumption requires energy consumed by those that produced your consumption.

Really, the best way you can reduce your energy footprint (other than killing yourself) is to quit your job and become a subsistence farmer in a temperate climate where you don't need energy for warmth.

Revised fundamental equation: Energy = Life * Social Complexity

We will always consume the most amount of energy we can afford. This means power savings from OLEDs will only contribute to having more OLEDs, and total power consumption will remain the same.

Fundamental equation: Life = Energy. If we as a species don't find a way to regulate energy consumption, Mother Nature will.

The only thing worse than the intolerant players is the fucking noobs that need to learn how to play or GTFO.

Google is also introducing the new service "Particle" which will be the same service with different properties.

http://creditspectrum.blogspot.com/2008/12/state-of-financial-engineering.html#0

Any rational, moral, self-made man knows dependence on the Sun is entirely ludicrous. A man may seek out and enjoy the riches of his own efforts without regard of the Sun, Moon, weather, other men, or little furry animals. This is why we should cut taxes.

Cable news channels (CNN/Fox/MSNBC/etc) don't contribute to the gathering and reporting of news, they only regurgitate (over and over and over and...) that of news gathering organizations (NYTimes/Washington Post/WSJ/AP/Reuters).

I subscribe to the Financial Times on my Kindle. I just installed the iPhone app and FT is not available to download, only the books I've purchased.

News organizations should make aggregators and ISP's pay for content. Google and ISP's wouldn't have a service to profit from if others weren't working so hard creating the content they serve. It's just like DirecTV paying Food Network to be in it's channel lineup. Google should pay NYTimes to search and display their reporting.