McBain: That was the joke.

Although I'm not huge on gun rights personally, Breyer's words come too close to sacrificing liberty for security. Also, the idea of allowing handguns is for self defense... you can't arm yourself with a rifle wherever you go, so until stun guns are perfected, there's an obvious legitimate reason for owning a pistol.

The big problem is that anyone in power to change the election system will most likely end up with less power if they do. As you say, the best chance is to start small, and hope people see the benefits.

Ontario had a very dispiriting referendum (of sorts) on the subject. Well, sort of. It wasn't for SRV or similar, but it was for giving more power to the popular vote by having a set of seats designed to make up for discrepancies between the popular vote and # of county seats won.

People voted roughly 2 to 1 in favor of the old way. No doubt the confusion played a part; it wasn't really advertised until a couple weeks before the election, and not explained well. I think most people were scared with having two different votes to make (once for your county's seat, once for the popular vote seats, in practice you would probably vote the same for both) and didn't see the benefits.

I don't think you realize how many factors cause small random changes in your computer's temperature. Picturing a conspiracy-style government body trying to simulate what the exact temperature of a computer will be at any given time makes me laugh.

Meanwhile, anyone local to the cpu can disconnect the cpu and secretly input some random data into the algorithm every so often. Good luck.

A lot of people agree with you on ethanol. It could even be that the oil companies are pushing it because it makes for such absurd competition (like hydrogen cars... much more practical than straight electric~). Wind farms have the drawback you stated but over the long run they output a somewhat predictable amount of power. You don't want these running most of your country's power. Solar will only improve over time and is my personal favorite because it cuts down on "middle-men". Sun --> Energy. No doubt they will be safer and faster break-even in the future. Kids should be encouraged to get into this tech; if there's a breakthrough in TVs every couple years we should be able to get more going here. I sort of regret not thinking of going into it but then again I might not have the right mind for it. I agree with you on nuclear. Solar is still on its way, while nuclear is mature, except for toxic waste problems perhaps. Overall, much much better than the old stuff on the environment, and totally practical for today.

But let's face facts, if everyone who meant to vote for Gore voted for Gore, Gore would have won.

Not a price issue, a supply issue.

Should we sell x minus y fully functional Wiis, or x fairly functional Wiis and get our foot in the door of more households?

Damn, I forgot what the whole point of my post was going to be. It wasn't to lash at the OP, it was to lash out at the humourless mod(s) that thought that this post was original and funny.

Wow, REAL LIFE tennis. I wish I thought of that joke 20 years ago, before kid's PSAs, always the leading innovation in humour, were making it.

(actually in a good mood today)

Also it requires exercise. People always fail to come up with the most obvious counter-point~

Seriously though, OP, did you really think you were being original with this? After 100 posts of "stop playing FPSs and pick up a paintball gun, nerds", 1000 posts of "Damn you young whippersnappers and your electronic golf" and 10 000 posts of "you know you can't play real guitar just because you play that game, right?", you'd think the normies would have given up on us by now. Now excuse me as I go back to my dishwashing sim.

You mean like how the dual-shock just added rumble, you know like the Wii-mote has has [sic] from the start?

The accelerometers that Sony crammed into their traditionally-styled controller a few weeks after the wii-mote was revealed?

And like the other AC said, Lair... Warhawk...

Too easy.

They could make a Mario themed FPS then. With the wii-mote control, they might not want to confuse the newbies with movement though. Maybe they can have him ride around on Yoshi, so the player only has to worry about the shooting aspect, and maybe command Yoshi once in a while.

Now with The PS3 trying to tailor to casual demographics with a game in Africa, I'm thinking this game should have a similar vibe.

So basically, you're riding Yoshi, traveling through these exotic locations, and the player points at the screen with his controller to shoot down various baddies from the Mario universe. Oh, and throw in the koopalings from SMB3 to placate the hardcore crowd into buying it.

How does "Yoshi's Safari" sound?

:)

"Guitar Hero controllers teach you as much about playing guitar as a steering wheel bolted to a subway seat teaches you about driving"

That would be a description of holding a full-sized, six string guitar that doesn't produce any sound.

Guitar Hero is like playing Burnout with a toy-sized steering wheel that has no force feedback. And possibly AI-controlled accel\brakes if you're not feeling charitable.

And yes, for those willing to learn, it does too teach rhythm (as does DDR, EBA...), although GH doesn't enforce it thanks to it's enormous timing window.

But I don't really care about how realistic the guitar is. Too busy playing Rock Band with e-drums.

Even most believers in God would agree. Why ask anything when you're omnipotent? (Except to pour salt on the wound, but that's just mean).

You can't prove it is, so it's not.

Or is that you can't prove it's not, so it is?

Agh. This is why I don't like religion and conspiracy debates.

"Finally, what does Google intend this open sourcing to do? Do they want every application on our computer to have an auto-update-without-asking running continually in the background? Bad as what Google is doing, that'd be an even worse horror."

Obviously I'm missing something here. Imagine a world where applications update themselves silently in the background when the computer is idle, so the newest version is always ready to use. The. Horror.