How many white people were terrorists and chose air travel as their means to spread terror? As a frequent flyer, all I have to say is thank goodness that the domestic terrorists to which you refer (Tim McVeigh, ELF and the like) haven't chosen to use airplanes to cause terror. Air travel would grind to a halt in the US.

You said: "well at least if the Chinese are going to ravage Tibet, they might help save the environment. So let us acknowledge and shed a tear for Tibet's sacrifice for all mankind." Honestly, the first sentence should be in the past tense. Have you ever been there? Monasteries which held 10,000 monks reduced to 6. Yes, 6. Most other monasteries obliterated entirely. Massive Han Chinese "settlement" in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa means it is barely Tibetan anymore. Breaks on the limit on number of children for Han Chinese that relocate to Tibet. And that is just recently. Go back a decade or two and you will find overwhelming military force used to subjugate and kill Tibetans. Mass rapes of Tibetan nuns. Plundering of the treasures of the potala. (The only reason the big gold bhudda remains is that it was too big/heavy to carry away.) Lets not forget the brilliant idea of forcing Tibetans to grow wheat instead of barley and the ensuing famine. Anyways, having been both there and Bhutan, I can say that in my observation, the Tibetan culture is dying. Contrasting it with the Bhutan culture, there is no way you could say the Tibetans have survived the Chinese onslaught. Even 10 years ago when I was there it was unmistakably a dying culture. The ravagement was more or less complete at that time. Now it is just time for the vultures to pick over the corpse (yes, a deliberate reference to sky burials).

I will second that. Hardest game I have every played (and I started with Wizardry on an Apple IIc). But it is also in the top 5 in terms of best/most rewarding.

Sorry, you are correct. But to clarify for those who don't care to click the link, the statistics themselves are from the National Center for Health, part of the CDC. So about as unbiased as one could reasonably expect without working through the numbers yourself.

Actually the number is about 4-5x times that. I am remembering 14,000, but you can find a breakdown on the NRA site (http://www.vpc.org/nrainfo/phil.html): 11,920 firearms homicides in the USA in 2003.

Well, I am not trying to get work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, am I? Grammar Nazis.

Aye. And while I know nothing about your writing skills, I am absolutely confident that you would do better than Travis Wright, based upon his work from Eagle Eye. Eagle Eye was a giant steaming pile of garbage with virtually nothing to recommend it in any respect. The dialogue was terrible, and the plot worse. Travis Wright should be locked up and never allowed access to a pen, computer, pencil, crayons, or anything else that he might use to right with ever again.

If I am not mistaken (and I might well be) most books these days are not manufactured on acid free paper. Given that, they will probably last 50-70 years at best. Unless you treat them to prevent decay, and store them in a temperature and humidity controlled environment, or sealed.

Having said that, I agree with you that longevity is key. We don't need material to be lost because data portability isn't available. However, given increasing power, the ready availability of tools today that let you strip out the text from proprietary formats, and virtualization (who cares if you can't read the file if you can virtualize a machine that can?) I am not terribly worried.

There are good and bad reasons for not buying an ebook reader, but I don't honestly think this is one of them. (And yes, I am a convert. I have had a Sony PRS-500 for 2.5 years, and just bought a 505.)