The AI may manage to make things interesting against other AI, but against human players...it's easy for human players with a tiny military to essentially be King Leonidas, and win. Particularly egregious if you have a bottleneck, which you can easily defend with one ranged and one melee unit. This is due to the inability to combine military units (which you could've done in Civ IV) and the suicidal aggression employed by the AI.

With that in mind, a bunch of idiot AI's battling it out actually sounds interesting.

I'll use Eclipse for original, vanilla Java code. (not variants like Android's Dalvik) But I tend to prefer TextPad for most things. If I'm working on someone else's Java code, I'll tend to use TextPad as well (will often have both Eclipse and TextPad pointing to the same Java project) because I like its search feature. It does what I want it to and I've gotten really efficient with it. (which is really what builds one's loyalty to a program)

What's sad is it's kind of a strong play. It's technically a valid argument, but the problem is public safety is the oldest trick in the political playbook -- and it still works today to allow all sorts of crap legislation to pass. I fear the anti-net neutrality side rallying behind banners of public safety as John and Jane Q(lueless) Public will fall for it.

Not only that, but with 6 years of the left in power, the right is officially the underdog...for now. Just like the left was the underdog during the Bush years. There's nothing better to get your base riled up than to be the underdog, and to see policies implemented counter to your personal political beliefs. If the right gets back into power in 2016, it won't take the left long to acquire aforementioned status and gain a bit of a boost in the ratings.

Though admittedly it's a bit more complicated than that. A lot of folks on the right felt that Bush didn't adequately represent them. Such sentiment was one of the seeds of the Tea Party, and it gave Fox News something to latch onto before Obama was even elected. I tend to lean right these days (mainly due to my displeasure with the handling of fiscal matters) so I can only speak from that viewpoint...it might take awhile longer for the pendulum to swing the other way again as I know nothing of their internal bickering.

Regarding this last statement:

they're likely to have difficulty luring developers away from established platforms.

Kindle is already built on top of Android, and Amazon has partnerships with Android developers already. It's also a time-proven platform that's becoming ever more insurmountable for anyone trying to get their own platform off the ground. (take Windows Phone 8, and Microsoft had a decade head start) With all that stated, why is TFA assuming that this new smartphone would have anything but Android as their backbone?

If a window breaks, you can still see through it. If a monitor in your tank breaks?

I'm totally with Tesla that it should be a legal option, but it shouldn't be a requirement to go digital with side view. On one hand, you have the drag...on the other hand, the classic mirrors are less prone to ceasing to function effectively. (smudging/moisture/frost is also a concern, which often renders my rear camera useless -- easily fixed with classic mirrors, and driver's side can wiped off while driving)

It's worth mentioning that Safeway and Lucky's runs a different business model than Wal-Mart. The first two can be cheaper on a small list of items because they put deep cuts on maybe 10-20% of their inventory every week. So at least with slow perishables (and if you're less picky in general), over time if you're careful you could do better with Safeway easily. But if you have no desire to get such a rotation going, then yeah, go with Wal-Mart. Also good for things like meats and dairy that you'd prefer not to store a month's worth at a time.

Oh, and just to fully recap my many posts ranting about Bitcoin, aside from what I've said already in this thread...I'm waiting for something to come along that provides the benefits of Bitcoin but without the price instability. Its stock-like nature is going to doom it because consumers (and more importantly, merchants) need more "familiar" price stability to become comfortable with and actually use a currency for currency purposes. The vast majority of current Bitcoin users are still speculators and unwitting individuals, along with some merchants who would probably prefer something more stable but need the anonymity to conduct business...and a few outliers here and there.

Anyone who's been burned once by previous crashes won't ever want to get back on board the Bitcoin train...

Like I said, "similar", not "exact". Bitcoin is the poster child of the inflatable, independent currency experiment, but it shares traits similar to the stock market and limited quantity physical goods. It's not impossible for something which shares the traits that guided the valuation of Bitcoin to emerge. It'll likely be a long way off and possibly too difficult to identify in time to profit from it.

I for one wonder if this'll be the last big rally.

I've been absolutely terrible at predicting when this train will end. An unstable currency that is not suitable for the vast majority of merchants and individuals is doomed to fail eventually, but since I've been beating this horse Bitcoin has risen by 5000%. Rally #1 was the American public, rally #2 was from Greeks and other troubled European nations and now this rally is from the Chinese.

I wonder if anything significant is left? Regardless, it's way too high for me to even consider playing this game. I do hope something similar comes along in the future, perhaps it'll follow a similar pattern and I'll get on board early...

This isn't really something that one can gauge properly with their own anecdotes. In my case I practically never buy anything but well-packaged slow perishables so I have nothing to worry about. A small quantity of meat juices leaking into the bottom of someone's bag (rare enough that it doesn't ever happen to most people, but it is a concern on a broader scale) will feed a significant quantity of bacteria for a long time and create a real problem, versus the tiny bits that get onto your keyboard and create an infestation that only a germophobe can appreciate...

Again, personal responsibility, wash your damn bags, yadda yadda...as someone who'll eat fallen food while on a hiking trip and follow it up with a "meh", even I can admit that the concern here is reasonable.

heh, I'm not going to defend the intentions of general media sources, but I believe the concerns were that the bottom of peoples' bags were essentially petri dishes, and over time the infestation got to the point where all but the most thorough of washing of potentially contaminated food items (and even then...) would be ineffective.Of course one's own negligence is to blame in this case but what people forget about social engineering is engineering works with what you have, not some ideal.

This actually made headlines some time ago as an unintended, but very real consequence of San Francisco's bag tax...

ToS can be forgiven...it wasn't as cliche in 1967 to use Nazis as it was in 2004.

And yeah...they had a wonderful year-long season 3 arc, pretty well put together, and they cap it with space nazis? Why oh why...

This. My original post looks pretty ridiculous now, but I'm glad someone changed it. (I don't see that often)