"Or has this large growth served us well, exemplified by no successful terrorist acts on US soil since 9/11?"

The day after 9/11 I found a rock. I've kept this rock with me every day since then. Could it be more that this rock prevents terrorism?

Will people ever learn that correlation does not imply causation?

The BBC is not, has never been and can never be a newspaper. It is a publicly funded broadcast news outlet which has far less bias (read: practically none) than any US news network you can name, and is a trusted news source around the world.

Calling the BBC dubious is... dubious at best.

Clearly you've never seen the requirements MS throw down to even get your game on the 360. It's not just a case of 'get SDK, make game, sell it'. There's controller conventions, UI considerations, bug testing (and jesus, even insane you-would-never-do-these-action bugs still need fixing), etc. Hell, to put it into perspective, the GAME, not the console, has to deal with a memorycard being removed during the write process.

It's never a case of 'hurr hurr high def 360 == $60".

Typically any "real" ISO level on a DSLR is actual sensitivity adjustment, anything past that is post-process adjustment. So for the Nikon range you have:

D3000/D40/D50/D60/D70/D80/D200: ISO 100 or 200 - 1600 (3200 is a post-process adjustment on the D40 only, the D60/D3000/D80 and D200 do ISO 100 as base)
D5000/D90/D300: 200-3200 (ISO 6400 is a post-process adjustment)
D700/D3: 200 - 6400 (ISO 12800 and 25600 is a post-process adjustment)
D3x: 100 - 1600 (3200 and 6400 are post-process adjustments)

Rule of thumb with a Nikon camera is 1 stop less than the highest non-fake ISO is the highest you'll want to go; the D3/D700 are the only exception, where ISO 6400 is very very clean.

Ok, a few things to note:

The D40 uses a very old sensor (the one used in the D50 and D70). It's now two generations old, so if you upgrade to a D5000 or D90, you will notice a quality improvement, even in the ISO sensitivity. This is where Nikon has been the past few years, investing in decent high-ISO abilities. Now ISO 1600 on crop and ISO 6400 on full-frame Nikon cameras is clean enough to use for large prints.

The 5Dmk2 can only do 1080p for 12 minutes. This is to escape the EU regulation requiring a tax on video cameras, which are defined as any electronic device that can record video for 30 mins in one go. The tax is between 4.9 and 12.5%, and this is on top of VAT/tax you pay for in the EU anyway. Obviously the last thing Nikon or Canon want to do is fall under this tax, as it'd make their camera rather expensive.

If you want to record up to the file-system max, which is about 4GB, then you're limited to a shade under 15 minutes anyway, since the 5dmk2 records 1080p at 4.8 MBytes/sec. The D5000 could reach near 30 mins; recording at the 720p, 24fps option goes at 2.3 MBps which would give you near 29 minutes, if it were not for the artificial limit. The same could be said of the D90, which records at 1.7MBps, giving you near 40 mins; again, save for the limit. (Figures for the D300s are not out yet)

It's not a checkbox, it's a tested requirement. The game is played on a SD TV by a third party (typically chosen or suggested by MS). Any problems with the requirements are failures to pass, and without a clean sheet, the game can't progress to release.

Dead Rising would've most likely been the reason why this is now a tested requirement.

NeoThermic

I'm not sure where to start picking the holes. I guess from the top:

RTLS, return to launch site, requires separation from the main tank and SRBs. Despite NASA's design changes most of us old rocket scientists think that will detonate the tank. Separating from the SRBs requires a hard pitch down to avoid the SRB plumes, which in real life the shuttle does not have enough aerodynamic command to achieve.

Considering that there are NO abort modes that happen before SRB separation, you're talking shit there. An RTLS, the earliest abort you can do after the SRBs have been ignited, can only be called after 123 seconds (When SRB separation happens) and before 150s after launch, or a call window of only 27 seconds.

Also, the shuttle does not have enough cross-range capability to achieve a Transatlantic landing at any facility capable of handling it. An attempt at TAL will result in a water landing with loss of vehicle and crew. TAL is bogus and NASA knows it.

Uhh, what? Considering the earliest time you can call an TAL the shuttle is 400,000 ft up and 400 NM away from Florida, a ballistic trajectory gives the shuttle more than enough cross-range capability to land at the requested location (for ISS launches that's basically always ZZA).

Abort Once Around suffers from Earth rotation and the lack of sufficient cross-range capability. All viable landing sites are just not available on a once-around.

Again, what? An AOA means the shuttle enters a low orbit that is not stable with the express means of doing two OMS burns giving it the re-entry profile of a normal end of mission re-entry. An AOA can only be called after a TAL can't be done but before an ATO is called. This is a window of just a few seconds, so the chance of needing to do an AOA is slim even if things are going wrong. Since an AOA is still technically an orbit, the cross-range capabilities of the shuttle are that of anything orbiting the earth; anything is reachable within 90 minutes.

Now, about the Crew Escape System (CES), which are "tractor" rockets that pull the crewmen out one at a time. The shuttle reaches 25,000 feet in under a minute. At 35,000 feet its breaking the speed of sound. It seems the only way the CES will work is if you shut the main engines down.

This just highlights how clueless you are about shuttle abort modes and procedures. The CES would only be used if you could not land the orbiter, but after you had either pulled an RTLS, TAL or AOA. You could never exit the shuttle during launch, so I'm not even sure what you're thinking about shutting the main engines down. An RTLS, TAL and AOA have a flight profile that allows the CES to be used if required.

Back in the the 1960's, the F-111's entire crew compartment ejected.

The F-111 seated two. Next to each other. The shuttle seats six or seven on a normal mission, and only four are anywhere near each other. The other seats are in the mid-deck, with a substantial amount of shuttle around them. An ejector system like the F-111 would be impractical due to weight, be unusable at launch and only usable after a successful re-entry. Thus of the two shuttle accidents that have happened, such a system couldn't have been used. For either

NeoThermic

P.S. Mexico City isn't a landing site and never has been.

I've done development for the Xbox 360, and one of the submission requirements is to have the game properly tested on SD hardware. You can fail a submission if this has not been done, and for that MS do not release the game. It surprises me that it appears there's no such requirement for PS3 games...

This is incorrect. While an RTLS, TAL and an AOA have never been performed, an ATO has. Of which, depending on the severity of the abort condition, a TAL or AOA is perfectly survivable. An RTLS is the only one which is a major risk. RTLS aborts are flown in simulations (all abort modes are), so in simulated returns they are possible, and mathematically they are, but the real question would be if the chips were down could you fly an RTLS.

Don't forget, you don't need to *land* the shuttle in an RTLS to survive, there is still the option to use the ICES if the shuttle is unable to land but is able to keep a sufficient profile after a successful tank drop in an RTLS. You can use the ICES at 25,000 feet as long as you can bring the shuttle back to 200 knots.

Just to put a huge hole in your rant, the passwords in question *were* md5'ed. They were only in md5 format because they were passwords left unconverted since the hash algo changed in phpBB3. To convert them, it requires the user in question to log in just once post-conversion. The accounts cracked had not done that and were thus very unused accounts.

NeoThermic

Mine's divisible, it just has a nice remainder... ;)