Perhaps you're just too used to sitting 12' up in the air in your Hummer? I routinely drive a 1974 Triumph Spitfire, that I would hazard to guess sits much lower than anything Tesla is offering. I've never had a problem with visibility, even with the hardtop on.

There can be only one!

I am indeed. Thanks for the heads up on that one!

Perhaps the broader point is that it should apply to more people. People should be more inclined to grow or raise their own food. People should be inclined to eat more vegetables and less meat. People should stop breeding (and eating) at a pace that is beyond our sustainability. We shouldn't be wasting the majority of our food crops to feed livestock, just so we can eat beef three times per day.

The idea that a big slab of beef should be the center piece of a meal is insane, and almost exclusive to the Western World. It accounts for not only a lot of waste, but also a lot of health problems. Instead of having a 20lbs. steak and a volleyball-sized potato with an entire stick of butter melted across it, why not try some fresh fish with steamed vegetables or strips of grilled chicken with rice? Not only will it taste better, but your body will feel better in the long run.

The problem is that the meat industry receives so many subsidies that most people think it's impossible to dine affordably without stuffing their guts with red meat. Try growing your own vegetables. Raise some livestock to treat yourself throughout the year. Not only will the quality of your food go up dramatically, but you won't have to worry about ingesting all of the bizarre hormones and antibiotics that you get with commercial foods.

I'll take my cyberpunk without the magic, please. Really, Shadowrun is little more than D&D with guns.

I should have specified. I don't think that failing in Linux would drag Valve down. I do think there is a very real possibility of Valve's Linux venture not taking off however.

That is a fair point for those people that use such services. Personally, I can't think of any DRM-based distribution services that I use outside of Steam however. I only get discs from Netflix, and absolutely hate iTunes.

I love Linux. I've had some distribution or another set a second partition since the late 90s. It's great for basic usage and applications. Your average user will miss out on nothing by switching to Linux. But for me, it's not something I can use full time, try as I might. Games are a big part of it, but there are other things as well.

I'd say that the lack of Adobe's Creative Suite is a huge sticking point for me. I use just about every one of those programs on a near daily basis. It might work well enough in WINE, but that's not exactly the kind of experience most users are looking for anything. There are certainly no open-source alternative that stack up against Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere. Hell, there aren't really any proprietary products that work as well as Adobe's suite does for most things.

We've seen the light of hope that is games before. I'm sure we all remember Loki Software. It was a great concept, seemed to have a ton of support, and the ideology was even spreading throughout some of the better developers, like Id Software. Then it went belly up, almost quicker than it hit the scene to begin with. I hope that's not the case now with Valve, as Linux has matured quite a bit. Still, the worry is there. They can either put the effort forth and force hardware developers to get in line, or they can fail. Really though, between a handful of Steam games and Minecraft, I would be covered in Linux. :P

Finding the solution to Adobe's absence is an altogether different problem though. They sell remarkably expensive software to professionals. They don't see the money in supporting Linux. The upfront costs would surely be high, and that isn't helped by the perceived unwillingness of Linux users to pay for any software, let alone pricey software. If they weren't in it for the money, they wouldn't be throwing out toy-like applications for tablets.

We should really get together sometime! It'd be fun to shoot at another human being for a change. But should we play TF2 or CS:S? ;)

It's been about 7 years for me. I have a cheap Netflix account and a server full of ripped media. It all plays just fine through my Boxee at almost no cost at all. I don't watch more than a couple of hours of movie/television in any given day anyway. I pity people who have nothing better to do in life than sit around watching the latest reality show.

He should have just released it on the PC instead. It has a much larger built-in audience, and doesn't cost anything in licensing/patching fees. It really serves him right for siding with some outdated set-top box.

Console kiddies don't know how to play first-person shooters anyway. No big loss on either side there.

Again, my statement was not in direct relation to the rental of vehicles. Rather it cherry-picked the aforementioned quote to offer a broader sense of what is or isn't just.

That said, I do indeed think you would be a fool to hand your keys over to anyone that you didn't not personally know and trust. Barring that, you would certainly be a fool for providing access to your property (via rental) to someone whom is in this country illegally. They almost assuredly have falsified documentation and would leave you with little legal recourse were something to happen to your vehicle.

No, my reply was in reference to the grandparent's statement, just as yours' seemed to be.

I wouldn't hand over the keys to my car to any stranger, let alone the majority of my friends and family. Race or legal status would have very little addition bearing on the situation, if any.

My first thought was: Why even go into a McDonald's? They're disgusting enough in the States, let alone when surrounded by the plethora of fine dining throughout Paris. It just stinks of consumer conditioning, frankly.

My second thought was: This guy is a coward. Why would he show off his medical papers to every asshole who looked at him funny? He can explain the presence of the glasses, their use, and move on. Unless it's airport security or something, no one really needs to see his doctor's excuse. Following up on that, this guy allowed himself to be manhandled, his device potentially damaged, and then just stands around talking and snapping picture for passive aggressive internet rants later? Please. Those minimum-wage fucks should have had their asses kicked. That right there is what's wrong with the world and exactly why people think they can do the things they do... because no one stops them.