Chemical castration, on the other hand, is a process increasingly used on sex offenders, for while it oppresses the offender's libido, it does not cause any permanent physical changes to his body (in contrast to chopping his balls off), and once the "treatments" are stopped, it is quickly reversed again.

The United States as well as Israel have been experimenting with chemical castration as a punishment for sex offenders for a while now, and it seems to be working pretty well.

I'm an atheist as well, and I agree that religions may contain many lies (although, noble ones) depending on how you take the data they provide you with, but if you make claims like this it's hard to believe you're anything but trolling.

Sure, we can be very certain that there was no Noah and his ark, and Jesus didn't turn water into wine - but quite a few of the fictive tales in the Bible (especially the Old Testament) have a historical basis or are metaphors for actual historical happenings. Studying the historicity of the Bible is a fully secular, academic discipline, and I wouldn't exactly call it stupid.

Say what again! I dare ya! I double-dare ya!

Heresy!

Not only are they customers, I'm quite sure they also make up the *majority* of Rapidshare's customers. Why would you want to pay for a RS subscription if you weren't using it to DL a large amount of rar archives?

Oh? I'm pretty sure Baldur's Gate II was developed with a much smaller budget than, say, Mass Effect 2, and while I absolutely love both games, I find BG2 to be way superior in both story and gameplay.

The quality issue isn't about cash, it's about casual vs gamer and publisher vs devs.

...and also established a strong state control of Germany's economy, built quite a lot of civilian structures using tax money, brought a national health care system...

They certainly weren't communists and they weren't total socialists either, but both socially and economically, they overally stood on the left and not the right (unlike Hirohito's state or Mussolini's fascists).

That being said, I was more talking about contemporary Nazi parties which tend to be much further on the left than their predecessors, taking "national socialist" quite literally.

I don't know. Call me wrong when I am, but I've heard OpenGL, while very suited for industrial rendering, isn't too great for games due to performance issues.

I think the real reason for few DX11 games being around is that XP is still a very dominant part of the OS market - and DX10 and 11 have been designed not to support it in order to get gamers to buy Vista and 7.

What's described as "right wing" in Europe usually means "left-leaning centrist" or even "moderate left". Actual right wing politicians (Geert Wilders, Thatcher, US Neocons, Libertarians) are usually described as "fascist" and thrown in together with our Nazi parties (which, in fact, tend to be left-authoritarian, remember, national *socialist*, but nobody wants to hear that).

In modern warfare, numbers aren't that important anymore. It's all about force multipliers. The United States may have a (comparable) small military, true, but even the lowliest of their grunts is a highly trained and well equipped specialist. Just look at the last few wars the US has fought in (and I mean *actual* wars, not peacekeeping/stabilizing which involves fighting guerillas) - every time, relatively few US troops have inflicted major casualties with minor losses.

It'd almost be like the real thing!

People who spend their time posting lists on Slashdot :P

Nope, you're wrong. Virii is the Latin plural which has established itself as the plural for computer virii (at least it has in the scene), while viruses is used for their biological counterparts.

Maybe not completely without DRM, yes, but certainly with acceptable DRM. Take a look at Mass Effect 2 - all it had was a simple non-rootkit CD check. Sure, it's DRM was easily circumvented and the game was available in certain circles long before it's official release, but I've bought it nonetheless (and so did many others).

As funny as it may be, EA got burnt early and hard (see: Spore) and thus slowly, but surely starts to wise up regarding DRM, and it's just a matter of time until other publishers follow. The DRM war is over. We've won.

Nah, it's just a sudden, unexpected outbreak of common sense (probably not even that - it's probably just our politicians playing anti-American again). It's not as shiny in Europe as many seem to think.

You know, in one of our countries, we've got our presidential elections upcoming and the only major opposition party's not even nominating a candidate, because they know that even if they'd win the vote, they'd still have no real power and would be forced to have the other party agree on every decision they'd like to push through - and that's by far not an issue exclusive to said country, that's for sure.[/offtopicrant]