The appeal is that it isn't real life. I like being able to be a superhero. Rocket jump, jump through portals, breath under water and in outer space, travel faster than the speed of light, be shot a ridiculous number of times, quaff a potion that makes me fly... all of these things are fun.

If I wanted realism I'd go outside and play real sports.

Even if the shows are advertisement free they really aren't. I can't watch a show on cable now without having little popups telling me to watch the show that is coming up or this weekend and when that goes away we get the privilege of seeing the channel watermark for more than half the show.

I'll go out on a limb and say that movies and television are a form of art (some good, some not so good) and to me tacking up advertisements over Citizen Kane is equivalent to going to an art museum and having an advertisement for the latest car from Ford blasted across the bottom of a painting by Van Gogh.

Why anyone tolerates it I do not know.

Hmmm, perhaps they weren't web applications at all but IE $version applications. If they would've built real web applications this wouldn't be a problem.

There can be several advantages to using an SLR vs live preview.

First, live preview will drain your battery a LOT more than passively looking through the lens.

Second, staring at an lcd in a dark environment will mess up your night vision. It'll also put a nice glow on your face which may not be what you want when you are taking pictures of your kid's school play.

Using live preview is really difficult in very bright conditions unless you have a blanket over your head like the old school photographers.

Tracking fast moving things is more difficult for me using live preview.

I'm sure there are other reasons that people find utility in using a DSLR over live preview.

Trying to place a dollar amount on human life. After all, the security saves lives so how can he say that X lives are only worth Y dollars? Is he an inhuman monster?

Lets just ponder how many lives would be saved by applying the money that is spent on security theater on something useful like vaccinations, prescription drugs or nearly any other public health initiative.

A country that has compulsory military service is trying to ban violent video games? I guess training to actually kill someone is okay, but moving some pixels around on a screen to get a high score is down right not acceptable.

Unless you enjoy being the target dummy for the army of 70s running circles around you.

This is why leveling in FPS sucks. Why handicap someone just because they are new to the game?

Serfers would probably be more to their liking.

It doesn't matter if IE9 is able to warp time so the page loads before you finish typing the url and speed up your computer so you could break any encryption scheme. The fact is that large corporations and bureaucracies are not going to upgrade past IE6 until civilization is wiped out. IE9 won't be upgraded to just like IE7 and IE8 haven't been upgraded to and web developers will have to keep building (or at least hacking to get modest functionality) for the lowest common denominator.

In other words, use HTML as a document markup language instead of an application platform. I thought for quite a while that forcing the square web application peg into the round document hole is a bad idea. We'd be better off if someone created an open web application standard that everyone would actually adopt. Perhaps something engineered with the capabilities that we want built in, instead of hacking (though some of the HTML/Javascript hacks are quite elegant) an application framework onto a document one.

Clearly there is a demand for this sort of thing hence Flash and Silverlight and Java applets before that.

The "media" doesn't even pay writers, musicians etc anymore, at least not for Television. Witness a thing called reality TV.

I've seen it where the government will bring in "contractors" who will write a custom web application with tons of horrible, unaudited code and they won't blink an eye at the cost or the quality.

However if you want to install a new version of something that fixes a security vulnerability or is a free feature upgrade like you suggest with KDE 3.0 to KDE 3.5, good luck.

Even if they ship a browser that is standards compliant and passes ACID 3 yesterday, it won't matter because we'll still have to deal with all of the corporations that refuse to upgrade past IE6 until 2075.

Even if the programming is good you can't watch it now. They like to cover up half the content with scrollers, station identifier logos, and advertisements for the damn show you are already watching.

Nothing turns me off from a cable channel more than when a giant advertisement pops up that covers up the face of the main character and/or obscures subtitles.

I like to relate it to going to an art museum and while you're standing there looking at a Picasso, down from the ceiling drops an advertisement that obscures the whole painting that says "Come back in two months to view a painting by Rembrant!!", of course this thing is made out of a zillion LEDs that blind you.

At one point you paid for cable to not have to watch advertisements. Then they got us to pay and have normal commercial breaks like regular TV. Now you have the privilege of paying to be bombarded by ads constantly without being able to watch the program.

Thanks, but no thanks. I'll be getting my entertainment elsewhere.

The blood chunks in Quake II were a feature. By that I mean that they quickly gave you feedback on whether or not the person you just shot was killed or not, thus allowing you to ignore them and shoot one of the multitude of other threats roaming the map. Wasting time on dead things is an irritant to me in other games and slows down the pace of the game.

Granted the effect could've been different to achieve the same level of feedback, but having a cloud of hearts and rainbows appear instead of giblets doesn't seem to fit the setting of an alien invasion.