there is about 1000000 websites out there that will answer this better then /.

Last I checked Firefox doesn't pass the Acid3 test either though - 94/100...

Which brings me to this question: Secretary of State William Cohen once claimed in a briefing that "[Some countries] are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves." Anyone around here know if this is this even remotely possible?

Or they'll just buy the game used and download a crack to get multiplayer for free.

Perhaps it matters a bit less in fps's, but when it comes to rpg's and rts's, cheating really makes for an unpleasant gameplay experience. I remember that late in the life of Diablo (1) cheating was pretty much inescapable on battle.net...

However, that's clearly not their stated intention - to the contrary, in fact.

Uh, yeah.. because stating that your intent is the opposite of what you're doing makes it ok, just like we learned on the playground.

"It's not my intent to hit you in the face, but I'm going to start swinging my arms and walking toward you..."

First off, kudos to ComputerWorld for this shocking newsflash "New Windows Operating System is Bloated and Disappoints Users". Is it 1995 again when I foolishly believed Microsoft and loaded Windows95 on my happy Windows 3.1 computer only to discover the 4MB minimum RAM requirement left my computer a useless lump of plastic with an endlessly spinning hard drive? Four more MB of memory for $130 from a shady computer dealer finally slowed the paging down. I have seen this cycle repeated 6 more times since then. Go ahead and set up the fill-in-the-blank story for Windows 7.1, 8, and so on.

Here is how to get a valid test together:

1. Figure out the testing objective. Sounds like this guy should build a Windows 7 and a Windows XP box with identical hardware side-by-side.

2. Install the same applications on both machines and run the same workloads on them.

3. Measure the performance using the only benchmark users care about, waiting times for things to happen. One thing that was unclear from this article (which I actually read, must be new here) was the level of memory paging that was going on and especially the feedback from the users. The numbers he talked about are pretty much of no interest to end users, just guys in the I.T. shop.

4. Call ComputerWorld with the results, but only if they make Windows 7 look terrible...

Anyone who was in Canberra around 2003 is going to find this spookily familiar. The Mount Stromlo Observatory was pretty much destroyed by a bush fire in that year. It was especially sad because it could have been saved except that the firefighters were focused on Canberra suburbs and towns like Tharwa. Also, a CCD they were building for an international telescope got left behind in the panic. Stromlo was historically important but past its best as an observational sight by that time.

When an ambassador commits suicide, the overwhelming preponderance of presumption should be that he was quietly "assisted" by the CIA.