OpenOffice.org was hindered partially by Sun, and crippled(literaly) by Oracle.

There, fixed that for you.

You have a piont there, and that's realy what I was thinking too, but more along the lines of how future scientists will see us. The scientific comunity poured a huge amount of time and recorces into developing cold fusion -for instance- that we now now to be either imposible or nearly so. The piont I'm trying to make here is that you realy don't know if somthing is imposible or not untill you actualy try it.

As a case in piont here, it is actualy posible to change a lead atom into a gold atom, using a special atomic laser to shave off extra protons. Asumming you don't mind having an extramly unstable and radioactive ingot. The Alchemests where sure this was posible, they just didn't know how to do it.

This kind of reminds me of a species of possum (I don't think it's an Asutralaisian one, so it must be from the Americas). If there isn't food for all of these possums in the area, some will just drop dead allowing more food for those that are still alive.
From the stand piont of any given individual, this is a bad evolotionary move, but for the species as a whole it gives them a distinct advatage over a population that is continualy expanding and the food source stays the same size.

This is exactly what I thought too.
Right up untill the cinic part of my brian said : "anti terrorist tool". And then I had visions of anyone printing the word 'quaran' being dragged off under the patriot act after the printer phoned home.

I'm sorry to say it, but to me it looks a lot more like a clandesdine tool for the goverment to get rid of people they don't like. Even if it didn't start out that way I imagine it ending that way.

An excilent idear.
I have only one tiny problem with it. How do you plan of printing to it from your work station?

That's it: it's all up to the admin. Untill Cannon decides that all admins are stupid/ unAmerican/ terrorists/ all of the above.

And don't forget all of the hardcoded keywords that'll be in there for the goverment (RRIA) to track terrorists (don't think they won't be there, as soon as politicans see this they'll make it illegal to sell without somthing they can use to spy on their populations).

Does this mean it's in the neutral zone?

using only there own unreliable data set can't fin'd the planet.

There, fixed that for you.

Bolocks.
I think you'll find that the local planning office was at Alpha Centari, and presumably said hyperspace bypass is heading in the direction of earth

Not necessarily: If you assume that half of the population aren't (online) gamers, then the number of hours per gamer doubles.

I'd be willing to guess that only one person in 5 is tech-savy enough to be a gamer (remember that 'the population' includes octogenarians and infants), and that only half of them actually are, meaning that each gamer in this senario is clocking up an average of 510 hours per year, or 9 and a bit per week.

The advancement isn't in the attachment to the eye, but rather the machinerie of the device. The one that you're thinking of would have had a resolution of 4x4, meaning 16 pixels which where either black or white. If I understand corectly, this device has 60 pixels (about 7x7, it can't be square though) and produces some sort of grey scale (ether 16 or 256 both of wich beat 2). The thing is that they both interface into the optic nerve in the same way.

I can relate to this, except it took me *much* longer to realise that social interaction was important. Two years after finishing my collage education in fact. And then another two years of reading anecdotal stories like yours or formal studies saying the same thing in a different way, and trying to force my self into social interactions, which made my problem and by dependency on anti-depressants worse.

After that, a guy I'd known since the beginning of high school who I'd see on and off in the intervening decades said something that made me see the light: That I'm completely socially adjusted for people that I already know, people that I do get on with think that I'm getting better (I knew I wasn't changing) because I become more social around them, I meet a new person and this cycle starts again.
The light I saw wasn't that I was some sort of sociopath (which I thought I was for many years, therapy couldn't shake that out of me) but rather my mechanism for social interaction was different and slower than all the people around me.

The first thing that I thought was "sweet, the study was using open source games" quickly folowed by "How the hell did the suits who run these things find out about/where allowed by MS to use open source?" which ended in exactly the same thought that you had.