Why does it matter if the bribe-able politicians work on the federal level or the state level? If those powers were given to the states, then the states' politicians would be the ones being bribed. The result is the same.

The libertarian argument that the federal government should be considerably weaker and that state governments should be considerably stronger in its stead makes no sense to me whatsoever. And I live in one of the very wealthy states that would probably benefit from such a change.

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.

Yeah... perhaps I should have clarified: it's a netbook tablet.

I know about the scrolling thing, but I have the Lenovo S10-3t, which is a tablet, which basically means I'd need to use an external mouse to control the game if you have to rely on proximity to screen edge to scroll the display.

Well, I'd like to be able to run Civ5 on my netbook. Civ4 isn't really playable due to interface lag, even though blinding framerates aren't necessary for turn-based strategies. I'd like to use Civ3, but it can't run at anything but 1024x768 (netbook screens are 1024x600).

Maybe I'll just wait a year, see how the x200 series tables handle Civ5, and upgrade instead.

Well, we're talking about North Africa, not the Middle East. Sure, they're close to each other geographically, but the political realities are different. Further, the direct foreign investment of this sort of "infrastructure" could be beneficial. The influx of money should raise the standard of living those countries and it might encourage a different sort of economic growth than what we've seen in economies fueled by petrodollars.

Note to self: Don't see someone post about how they locked up their Firefox on identical hardware as yours and think "I've got to try that". At least I had time to go get another cup of coffee.

If only you could miniaturize that proton beam / nuclear accelerator into something the size of a backpack. Then you could go around busting things like... copper.

I suppose Tragedy of the Commons might be one way to describe the situation. But since we're not dealing with a free good, I think the Prisoner's Dilemma is a better fit. As per Wikipedia:

The prisoner's dilemma is a fundamental problem in game theory that demonstrates why two people might not cooperate even if it is in both their best interests to do so.

It does take around 10 calories' worth of nutrients to make one calorie of meat. But that's because the other nine calories are used in various other metabolic processes important for the animal to live. If you're just growing meat, you don't need most of those metabolic processes to happen.

Animals are very inefficient growers of meat. The idea behind this effort (besides the animal treatment issues) is that we are eventually going to be capable of creating machines that can grow meat much more efficiently than animals can. There's little reason why we can't shoot for very close to 100% meat-growing efficiency.

That's because the Patriot missile system was deployed in the early 1980s and developed in the '70s. GPS wasn't fully operational until the 1990s.

As for the example of the Patriot missiles missing the Scud missiles, that was during the first Gulf War. It wasn't really possible to have a network connection to those mobile launch platforms to do a time sync.

After having a ball with System Shock 2, I grabbed System Shock 1 because so many people have mentioned that it's just as good or even a greater game than the sequel. I just can't get past the interface. I played Doom, Dark Forces, and Duke Nukem 3d back in those days and despite their story limitations (relative to SS1), at least their interfaces were competent.

I've also heard good things about X-Com and loaded that up in my DOSbox install. Though, I think I gotta go dig up a manual for the game and read it. We are quite spoiled by modern tutorials and button tooltips.

Well, since they're in Europe, some of them might have bidets.

Look behind you, a three headed monkey!

Thank goodness. I'd have a much bleaker outlook for our species if the rest of the world thought like us brainless Americans.