I'm not saying go easy on the drunks. Once you're drunk, you're drunk - decision made, try not to do anything stupid. But texting, chatting on the phone, etc. when you're otherwise stone cold sober is a form of driving impairment you can turn on and off at will - no cold shower, aspirin and big pot of coffee required. Your judgement wasn't impaired when you got in the car and you didn't have to answer the phone.

It's reckless endangerment in either case - the difference is there's no breathalizer or "touch your nose and say the alphabet backwards*" test for chronic texters.

* I still can't do that sober (or drunk).

Why shouldn't malicious and willful ignorance be punished harshly?

You know better than to get behind the wheel after ten or twelve beers, but some people do it anyway. Driving drunk, driving while texting, driving while playing a gameboy.... frankly, I don't see much of a difference.

Beyond the fact you can turn off the phone or the gameboy in a snap, whereas sobering up takes time. Given that, I'd figure the penalty would be harsher!

Or weed whacking...

... Type One Autonomous Mobile Swords.

Eep!

One of the reasons I stopped taking the Mac even remotely seriously as a games platform - the butchered ports of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.

BG lost multiplayer and voice sample customization, required all four CDs and swapped continually, even on fast-for-the-time hardware.

Bioware or whatever company was subcontracted to do the dirty work couldn't be bothered to port the DM toolset.

iD and Blizzard games are feature-complete between platforms. The problem is obviously on the developer (or the porting company's) end.

If you won't take the time, you're not worth my money.

I'd love to know where the "will go quickly obsolete" thing is coming from. It's FUD of the highest order.

Hell, I'm still using a G4 dual 450 (with a SATA PCI card) as my primary media machine. It sucks for HD (more due to bus limitations than anything else, I think), but rocks SD like there's no tomorrow. The machine is nine years old and is used daily, playing video or music almost all day, every day.

Yeah, I can't run modern games on it. And I haven't bothered to hack 10.5 onto it - 10.4 is more than enough. Hell, the machine has gigabit ethernet, which is still considered a Bleeding Edge Luxury in some corners of the PC world.

The only thing that will "quickly obsolete" a mac is video games - which is why anyone who's Really Serious about PC gaming owns a wintendo... and why they hold Macs in such low regard. Those of us that don't need to upgrade our video cards every six months in order to get 60fps out of whatever game has been released this week can happily get years of life out of modern equipment.

Windows has Office, Photoshop, web browsing and email, and a huge pile of big-name games from big-name vendors.

MacOS has Office, Photoshop, web browsing and email, Final Cut Studio, and a (very, very) few of the big-name games from the big-name vendors.

Linux (Ubuntu, Chrome, etc) has OpenOffice, web browsing and email.

Not intentionally trolling here, but the fact is that not everybody is a web or software developer. Every modern OS has a basic suite of internet access and media playback apps, but the fact is that people buy windows machines for a few reasons - it's What They Know, They Don't Know Any Better, and Their Game Or Application Doesn't Run On Anything Else* being the most common.

Bottom line, if all you need is a browser, a mail client, media software and a text editor... you can be OS Agnostic. You can choose whatever works best for you. Chrome could work for you as well as Mac OS X or Ubuntu or whatever.

If you're a gamer, a graphic artist, or do any sort of 3d modeling, Linux isn't on the table... and neither is the idea of running your application in a web browser.

From what I've read, I'd be able to do with Chrome what I can do with every other current OS on the market. And there's a LOT I won't be able to do with it.

So. What's the killer app? What compelling reason is there to use Chrome when everything out there already does web and email while giving me productivity ability that still doesn't exist on linux?

Disclaimer : I was seriously thinking on getting a netbook until I got my iPhone, at which point a netbook seemed pretty irrelevant. I was looking at Hackintoshing a Dell Mini 9, as the price is right and it would give me the applications I want to be able to use on the fly - stuff I can't do with the iPhone, but stuff I wouldn't be able to do with ChromeOS, either.

* File format tie-in is a big one here - I can't move to linux even if I wanted to thanks to my productivity hinging on (literally) hundreds of gigs of .psd and .max files. Switching to a 3d app that isn't Max or a pixel-pusher that isn't Photoshop would incur hundreds of hours of work cleaning up and retexturing models, environments and source documents for the new app, to say nothing of the learning curve.

Wake me up when I can drive home to visit my parents (250 miles, one way) without having to stop two or three times to recharge.

Range is only reason I'd ever have to get a car, and it's the one thing the electrics refuse to deliver. I don't care what it looks like - I want to be able to drive from Pittsburgh to Corning or Virginia Beach or Jersey (yes, Jersey) on one charge.

Hell, I can do it on one tank of gas. And the batteries are just as bad for the environment as the fuel emissions.... and gas cars are generally cheaper.

Oh, and another point - how does one charge an electric car in a metro area where on street parking is iffy and unreliable at best and a driveway is one of those little luxuries that quintuples your mortgage?

Hardly a commercial failure. Nintendo still gets your money for the hardware, and the vendors still get your money for the rom cart and micro SD card. :P

That a lot of DS games are gimicky crap, front-ends for a collection of gimicky minigames, or just plain shovelware is another matter. I'll gladly pay money for a good DS game that I'm guaranteed to get 25+ hours out of... that's a list of maybe three or four titles a year, none of which are produced by Ubisoft.

I was forced to use cursive. I sucked at it and had to teach myself how to print.

My elementary school taught cursive. Period. Students transferring in from other districts who knew how to print had their grades docked until they learned cursive - no matter how awful it looked. While my elementary school was quite insistent, my high school (no middle school, district was too small) didn't care either way... and because my cursive was hideously illegible and years of forced "practice" hadn't improved it at all, I spent all of seventh grade and most of eighth teaching myself how to print.

Almost two decades later and my self-taught handwriting style is still legible. Early samples are a bit weird (the cursive "I" took a long time to shake, for example), and if I'm rushed you can't tell my 5s from my Ss, my e's from my c's from my g's from my l's, but it works extremely well for me - I print faster than I was ever able to write in cursive, my writing is more legible, and most importantly, it was self taught. The public education system was absolutely no help in this regard, and for the first six years of my public school career the system offered no help or support - and in fact penalized - students who wanted to write but just couldn't deal with cursive.

Good penmanship is certainly an art form, but I really think the majority of society will happily settle for a lettered populace that can simply write legibly. Print, in my experience, is a hell of a lot more legible than cursive - there's a reason that every post-it note or hand-written message that lands on my desk at work is printed - so I can read it.

Make "penmanship" an elective. Teach the kids print - everything - everything - we read is printed or displayed that way... why should we be forced to learn an antiquated writing system that bears only the vaguest of relations to the type we read every day... unless we want to?

Screw cursive - that's six years of docked grades, extra coursework, and being GROUNDED and forced to practice for hours and hours in the parental and school district-al hopes that operant conditioning will produce their demanded assembly-line results. Six years I could have spent learning hand printing and how to type - both of which are things I had to teach myself later in life.

I've been using a G4 dual 450 for SD playback for the past several years... now I'm gonna have to upgrade! :-|

... it's easier to find a new DM than a new boss. Though unlike a boss, the Tinpot Dictator model of DM - the kind who doesn't listen to the players, who's "my way or the highway" with the rules, who tells you can always find another game if you don't like how he does things - is more likely to eventually change his tune if his players are unhappy.

(everyone who Knows Better will know I'm talking about most users, IT shops, etc - not the technical "merits")

Microsoft is finally getting bit by cultivating and preying on the culture of Good Enough. XP supports current hardware, runs current apps, ISVs are still writing for it. Users are comfortable with it, it handles games well (hey, check out the number of Big Name Games that require DX10), and while it's a security nightmare, most competent shops know enough to be able to keep their machines STD-free.

Vista is a host of new problems, support issues, and sucks on the same hardware XP zips on. Windows 7 isn't officially out yet... and when it is, most IT shops are going to wait. They'll poke it with a stick, sniff it like a dog, and rather it's a genuine improvement or not, they're not going to hop on it until they have to.

XP is the new BSD. It'll be "dying" for the next five to ten years. It's going to take a massive paradigm shift* in computing to get rid of it.

* I don't mean quad cores or eight-way cores or 64 gigs of ram for a nickel. I mean something equivalent to a massive rendering farm running an OS with a pile of APIs that'll securely handle every windows (and mac, while we're fantasizing) application ever written, with a battery life measured in decades. Said hardware would be the size of an iPhone, even easier to use, and you'd be able to buy them in vending machines at bus stations for $1.25. I mean that kind of paradigm shift.

Politically unattractive is the idea of depending on the Soyuz to get to the ISS while we continue to develop a new launch vehicle that by any reasonable metric should be done by now.

I'm a huge fan of the Russian space program, but I also feel that it's a matter of national pride to have our own crew launch vehicle(s). If NASA is incapable and commercial interests can step up, then let's go with commercial interests - bidding out to American companies means it's still an American project; an American "win."

What's more attractive - sending US Astronauts into space on a SpaceX or Scaled Composites launch vehicle, or bidding for space on a Soyuz launch (at over $40 million a seat) while bureaucrats continue to insist Ares/Orion will work?

I use Firefox and Safari regularly. I use two web browsers because each one does something vastly better than the other. Firefox for porn and online transactions, Safari for basic day-to-day anything that might include bookmark management (long story short, every browser I've used EXCEPT safari still does bookmark management using some variant of the horrific Netscape method - this includes IE, Mozilla, Firefox, etc - whereas Safari is the first browser I've used that does it in a non-bullshit fashion). However, useable as it is for bookmarks, Safari's a dick when it comes to password management and a few other things - most notably, how the browser handles while the system is paging out or otherwise shot in the ass with RAM overuse from other applications.

Long story short, under ANY kind of system load - we're talking ANYTHING above IDLE - Firefox is more responsive than Safari. When the system is shitting gold plated bricks trying to deal with the demands After Effects or Photoshop or Final Cut Pro is putting on it, Safari is beyond useless... and Firefox is responsive.

It all boils down to memory usage. Specifically, Swap/pagefile useage. On the Mac, firefox seems to be more responsive under load while safari is LESS responsive under the same conditions - it has ultimately has nothing to do with RAM usage and everything to do with how the respective applications use swap/pagefile.

Eat as much ram as you like... but until Apple does something about disk I/O, stay the HELL away from swap - or I'll use the application that does. (namely, Firefox.)