I wonder if we will actually be able to see more than 60% of the screen, this time? From the screen shots in TFA, it doesn't look like it. Within 5 seconds of gaining control in the first game, I opened up the menu to look for a way to change the perspective. When I realized that you couldn't, I gave it about 15 (incredibly frustrating) minutes before I simply shut it off, never to be played again. That was a UI decision right on par with Microsoft's ribbon, if you ask me.
"Difficult to label and identify in a way that people could trust"? Simply putting a term like "made from artificially-grown flesh", or whatever they decide to call it, on the label would constitute an express warranty. If that warranty is breached (by including regular meat), the customers can sue (and win). What's their complaint, here? Do they just have a total ignorance of basic business law?
In my opinion, programmers are born, not taught. People who naturally break their decisions down into logic structures will immediately see the usefulness in programming and find it interesting from the start. People who don't think this way will never enjoy or become proficient at programming. Changing the way that you present the introductory material isn't likely to change this. Advertising an intro class on "video game programming" might cause your enrollment to swell, but I doubt it will noticeably affect the number of people who make it through the program. If a student doesn't already intuitively understand basic constructs such as if-else chains, loops, variables, etc. in their own decision-making process before they take the class, they aren't going to be able to suddenly start thinking that way once you give them a lecture on the subject.
Although this is most likely a joke product, I would definitely go for something like this for gaming. MMOs in particular require an absolutely insane number of buttons to control your character proficiently. Changing the movement keys to TFGH, binding every other key within reach, and using an 8-button mouse still falls short most of the time.
No matter how good Chrome's JavaScript performance gets, it will never be faster, more reliable, or safer than simply not running any JavaScript at all. Blocking all JavaScript by default, with the ability to individually white-list individual items (close, but not quite, Opera), is a bare minimum requirement for safe web surfing. Blocking advertisements does more to speed up real-world browsing speed (not just benchmarks) than any other single change. Until another browser implements these two features, Firefox is the only rational option for home browsing.
I'm not a Firefox fanboy, I'm just aware of my needs. In the business arena, I wouldn't recommend anything but Internet Explorer (behind a proxy, of course), because no other browser comes with the enterprise management tools necessary for large deployments. That's another area that I wish more browsers would improve upon.
If either Opera or Chrome would implement those two feature sets along with their superior rendering performance, they would blow the web browser market wide open. I don't know why it hasn't happened yet, since most technical people are well aware of these issues.
How exactly do we verify that the choices we didn't pick on the form don't have the same set of verification characters as the candidate we did choose? It appears as though we can only see the code for a candidate if we reveal it with the invisible ink; checking the others would ruin the form. I think that these verification characters should be readily visible with or without the invisible ink applied. Otherwise, it would still be possible to fudge with the system and change the vote count while passing all of the verification tests.
Perhaps this is somehow handled by the "independent auditors", but TFA is light on details in that area. Since they don't have access to the voting machines and their source code, nor the actual forms themselves, I don't see how they could verify this, though.
That's hardly a decent solution to the problem, since EVE is the perfect example of how not to handle excessive numbers of players in a single location. EVE has a huge universe and all, but it's mostly accomplished by putting small groups of systems on their own "node". When any significant number of players pile into the same node and start doing things (such as shooting at each other, or just trying to take the gate to leave), it results in instability, poor performance, and quite often brings the entire node down on itself, sometimes stranding characters for days. EVE is quite notorious in the industry for poor performance issues, in fact, though they've been constantly improving over the years. It's also known for requiring an hour or so of downtime every single day or the entire system buckles under the pressure. The problem in MMOs is not scaling to a large world, as this is easily accomplished by simply dividing it into areas and adding more hardware for each segment. The big problem is when people decide to all hop into one location in the game and melt an individual server or node, which happens by default at launch time.
Disclaimer: I am not an anti-vaccination nutjob. The following post refers to the flu vaccination, and the flu vaccination only.
First off, with regard to TFA, this alone should not discourage people from getting the flu shot. The simple fact is that the "swine flu" is the same as the "regular flu" that we get every year. It is not particularly more infectious or deadly in any segment of the population than any other flu strain. The fear surrounding this particular strain is simply manufactured by the media. If the flu vaccine reduces the chance of getting the other 15-20 strains of flu by a significant amount, but doubles your risk of this particular strain, you still come out ahead.
However, most people should not even consider getting a flu shot in the first place. If you are between the ages of ~15 and ~60, and are in general good health, you should not get the flu shot. It terrifies me when I see flu shots being given out to students at local schools and colleges. These are the people who have absolutely zero risk of dying from the flu. None. Even if it leads to pneumonia, there is only a risk of death if proper medical treatment is not given. The worst that can happen is, well, that they catch the flu for a week or so.
The flu shot, on the other hand, can be extremely dangerous. My aunt was a nurse, and thus was required by her job to take the flu shot every year. She had been taking them for nearly a decade when, in her mid-thirties, she was paralyzed from the waist down by the side-effects of the flu shot. Had she not taken the shot, the worst that would have happened to her would have been simply getting the flu. She got a large settlement from the vaccine manufacturer and her employer. It was a rather fast process, as they knew beforehand that a certain percentage of people who take the flu shot would have this reaction. The cost of the settlements is simply rolled in to the cost of the vaccine. A couple of years later, a friend of the family suffered similar complications from the flu shot, and died. He was only 28 at the time, and in perfect health. Had he not taken the shot, the worst that would have happened to him would have been simply getting the flu.
The results of this study are interesting, but they make little difference. The vast majority of people should not be getting the flu shot in the first place. Taking it is simply rolling the dice unnecessarily. For those who are very young or old, the risks from the flu shot and the risks from the flu itself start to even out. In that case, the shot may indeed be a better idea. The results of this study do not change that fact.
Forget about the ideological wars surrounding open source for a moment. The simple fact of the matter is that open source saves significant amounts of time and money for developers, regardless of the license used for the code itself or on the platform it is developed for. As we all know, developers (developers developers) are central to Microsoft's business success. This new foundation can only improve the Windows application ecosystem, so it makes perfect sense for more than just tax reasons.
Yes, by BPM I was referring to the DDR setting used to control the speed at which the notes flow past the screen. The reason that it must be turned up for higher difficulty songs has less to do with the number of notes on the screen at once, and more to do with the amount of separation between them. At low speeds, there are not enough vertical pixels separating the notes to distinguish the order that they are actually coming in, and whether they are simultaneous (jumps) or not. When played at "normal" speeds, the notes will even overlap each other making a solid "wall" that is nearly impossible to work out, even if you were to pause the game and dissect the screen at your leisure.
I've spent a lot of time comparing how my rhythm games perform on various CRTs and LCDs, and I can tell you that the experience is orders of magnitude better on a CRT. However, if you're playing at low difficulties (1-10 steps) or low BPM (500 or so), then you are probably okay with an LCD. This range encompasses essentially all play that is done with your feet, so if you are physically dancing to your rhythm games, then by all means go for it. However, if you are playing rhythm games with your fingers on a keyboard or pad of some kind, you will find that it becomes completely unplayable on an LCD. The extra latency from the LCD combined with the very small amount of time that each arrow is on screen when playing on a high BPM (which is required for high-level play) makes it essentially impossible for a human player to even complete a difficult song.
I think that this stems primarily from a greater scientific understanding of the world around us. We hammered out a significantly more accurate picture of the universe with the development of quantum electrodynamics and relativity in the first half of the 20th century than the classical physics model that previous scientists and engineers had to work with. If you have a good idea how the universe works from the ground up, it becomes much simpler to predict what kinds of technologies can and will be invented in the future, and what form they will take. As the author states, the biggest surprise left lies in the creative implementation of those devices.
The "twice the size of Texas" figure is the lower-bound, conservative estimate. According to Wikipedia, the patch is estimated to be between 0.41% to 8.1% of the size of the Pacific Ocean. Also, the reason that this patch exists in the first place is because the North Pacific Gyre acts to collect debris (both biological and man-made) from around the entire Ocean. While still a relatively small area in size, it is incredibly important to the overall food chain due to the abundance of organisms sustained by the biomass collected by these currents.
The vast, vast majority of the trash contained in this "garbage patch" is composed of particulates far too small for the eye to see, suspended below the surface. Cleaning it up would require a large number of autonomous floating machines with, essentially, portable water treatment plants on board. All of these suggestions about fishing boats running around and scooping up plastic bottles out of the ocean is complete nonsense.
Imagine trying to filter the dirt out of a muddy lake. Extrapolate that to an area of the ocean a few times larger than the state of Texas, and you can begin to envision the magnitude of the solution required.
If the telecoms take this money, they will most likely be required to actually upgrade their infrastructure. The telecoms do not want to upgrade their infrastructure, as this would allow their competitors to eat away at their marketshare. What's the easiest way to stop people from using Skype, Netflix, Hulu, etc? Give them shitty internet speeds with low bandwidth caps.
If the buggy whip companies had owned the roads, they wouldn't take a government bailout to pave them for cars, either.
Windows has never played nice with other operating systems one the same machine. The first rule of multiple-booting has always been "install Windows first".
From what my EMT friends have told me, many hospitals are nearly permanently on "divert" status. Whenever a hospital is nearly full of patients (and many, particularly in large cities, almost always are) or their ability to accept and treat people is negatively impacted in some way (such as in this case), they go into divert status. This doesn't mean that they turn away people who come in for treatment, as anyone who comes in the door is still accepted. All it means that when an EMT picks up a patient and they see that one hospital is 12 minutes away, while another is 10 minutes away but on divert status, they may choose to go to the first hospital. If the patient is in critical condition and every minute matters, however, they will still go to the second for treatment. It's a logical measure that helps to ensure that everyone is treated in the most efficient manner.
You clearly did not fly with a competent group of players. In goonfleet, we recognize that our newbies are incredibly valuable and do everything that we can to keep them in fleets. You can, in fact, be incredibly useful in pvp from day one, as long as you are not trying to do it on your own (you know, second M in MMORPG). A week-old newbie can fly a cheap tackling cruiser (~2m after insurance and modules, so we give them out for free) with the health of a battleship that can be nigh-impossible to shake off. For a day or two of training and a few million more, they can do the same thing with a battlecruiser and start doing appreciable damage as well. Even when these things get blown up quickly, that's a battleship's worth of damage that our other players didn't take, which makes them well worth bringing. As far as making money goes, older players (in 0.0) don't salvage their wrecks when ratting because it slows down their isk/hour if they have good skills. We are always willing to let new players "hoover" behind us and keep whatever they want, and they end up making about 60-70% as much money as a max-skilled ratting pilot. Find me another game that allows a day 1 player to farm money at more than 60-70% of a veteran's rate, and then you can come back and complain about EVE.
Catching up with other players is not as hopeless as you make it out to be, either. You can have perfect skills for most any sub-capital ship in about 6 months, and past that point there is nothing you can do to make it better. Older players simply have the ability to fly more types of ships well, but you can still only fly one at a time so it makes little difference in actual encounters. If EVE had traditional "levels" like in other MMOs, you wouldn't complain that your level 5 character couldn't kill a level 100 character. The grind in EVE takes about the same time on average to "max out" a "class" as a regular MMO. Sure, powergamers can't knock it out in a week, but as you mentioned character purchasing is possible through legal channels in EVE, so if you really want to speed it up then you can grind for money (instead of EXP) and buy that character you want.
I'm a member of Goonswarm, both the largest alliance in EVE and the one whose reputation for meta-gaming might persuade you to think that we would use the CSM to give ourselves an advantage. While we openly admit to working as a group to get people into the CSM (we have enough votes to get 1-2 every time), as far as I know we haven't even tried to use it for our own political advantage because it would be almost impossible. What kind of change could we possibly propose that would benefit us over our enemies? Asking them to do something like improving the quality of the space we live in (which is the best in the game, anyway) would be transparent and silly. At best, we can (and do) ask them to fix some of the absolutely broken 0.0 mechanics such as POS setup times, titans, broken loot tables, among other things. While this does benefit us as an 0.0 alliance, all of our enemies are 0.0 alliances as well, so there is no real advantage gained. 0.0 alliances are not in direct competition with low-sec or empire alliances, so there is no advantage gained there, either. Of course, we also push for changes that affect the entire population, such as fixing broken ship types (probably half are worthless) and general balance tweaks (ewar springs to mind as the recent example).
I'm not saying that we wouldn't exploit the CSM for our own gain, but it just doesn't have the potential for doing so.
I'd say that one of the main problems is that it is close to impossible to attract competent replacements with the incredibly low salaries that we offer to teachers. Many(most) teachers in the public school system are nothing but glorified babysitters. You get what you pay for.
You clearly have not tried to play rhythm or fighting games with an LCD. When we are talking about single-frame (~15ms) input windows, the 10-50ms disparity between a CRT and LCD is the difference between hitting the inputs correctly and making the game completely unplayable. Yes, this applies to "2ms" response time LCDs as well. They have not improved, and it is unlikely that they will in the future.
This does nothing to prevent spam from giants such as gmail, hotmail, etc. who get their captchas broken. You can't blacklist them. It would be a good idea if everyone ran their own email servers, but they do not.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if we will actually be able to see more than 60% of the screen, this time? From the screen shots in TFA, it doesn't look like it. Within 5 seconds of gaining control in the first game, I opened up the menu to look for a way to change the perspective. When I realized that you couldn't, I gave it about 15 (incredibly frustrating) minutes before I simply shut it off, never to be played again. That was a UI decision right on par with Microsoft's ribbon, if you ask me.
"Difficult to label and identify in a way that people could trust"? Simply putting a term like "made from artificially-grown flesh", or whatever they decide to call it, on the label would constitute an express warranty. If that warranty is breached (by including regular meat), the customers can sue (and win). What's their complaint, here? Do they just have a total ignorance of basic business law?
In my opinion, programmers are born, not taught. People who naturally break their decisions down into logic structures will immediately see the usefulness in programming and find it interesting from the start. People who don't think this way will never enjoy or become proficient at programming. Changing the way that you present the introductory material isn't likely to change this. Advertising an intro class on "video game programming" might cause your enrollment to swell, but I doubt it will noticeably affect the number of people who make it through the program. If a student doesn't already intuitively understand basic constructs such as if-else chains, loops, variables, etc. in their own decision-making process before they take the class, they aren't going to be able to suddenly start thinking that way once you give them a lecture on the subject.
Although this is most likely a joke product, I would definitely go for something like this for gaming. MMOs in particular require an absolutely insane number of buttons to control your character proficiently. Changing the movement keys to TFGH, binding every other key within reach, and using an 8-button mouse still falls short most of the time.
No matter how good Chrome's JavaScript performance gets, it will never be faster, more reliable, or safer than simply not running any JavaScript at all. Blocking all JavaScript by default, with the ability to individually white-list individual items (close, but not quite, Opera), is a bare minimum requirement for safe web surfing. Blocking advertisements does more to speed up real-world browsing speed (not just benchmarks) than any other single change. Until another browser implements these two features, Firefox is the only rational option for home browsing.
I'm not a Firefox fanboy, I'm just aware of my needs. In the business arena, I wouldn't recommend anything but Internet Explorer (behind a proxy, of course), because no other browser comes with the enterprise management tools necessary for large deployments. That's another area that I wish more browsers would improve upon.
If either Opera or Chrome would implement those two feature sets along with their superior rendering performance, they would blow the web browser market wide open. I don't know why it hasn't happened yet, since most technical people are well aware of these issues.
How exactly do we verify that the choices we didn't pick on the form don't have the same set of verification characters as the candidate we did choose? It appears as though we can only see the code for a candidate if we reveal it with the invisible ink; checking the others would ruin the form. I think that these verification characters should be readily visible with or without the invisible ink applied. Otherwise, it would still be possible to fudge with the system and change the vote count while passing all of the verification tests.
Perhaps this is somehow handled by the "independent auditors", but TFA is light on details in that area. Since they don't have access to the voting machines and their source code, nor the actual forms themselves, I don't see how they could verify this, though.
That's hardly a decent solution to the problem, since EVE is the perfect example of how not to handle excessive numbers of players in a single location. EVE has a huge universe and all, but it's mostly accomplished by putting small groups of systems on their own "node". When any significant number of players pile into the same node and start doing things (such as shooting at each other, or just trying to take the gate to leave), it results in instability, poor performance, and quite often brings the entire node down on itself, sometimes stranding characters for days. EVE is quite notorious in the industry for poor performance issues, in fact, though they've been constantly improving over the years. It's also known for requiring an hour or so of downtime every single day or the entire system buckles under the pressure. The problem in MMOs is not scaling to a large world, as this is easily accomplished by simply dividing it into areas and adding more hardware for each segment. The big problem is when people decide to all hop into one location in the game and melt an individual server or node, which happens by default at launch time.
I'm not sure what planet you're from, but around these parts, pirated copies of Windows pass WGE checks just fine.
Disclaimer: I am not an anti-vaccination nutjob. The following post refers to the flu vaccination, and the flu vaccination only.
First off, with regard to TFA, this alone should not discourage people from getting the flu shot. The simple fact is that the "swine flu" is the same as the "regular flu" that we get every year. It is not particularly more infectious or deadly in any segment of the population than any other flu strain. The fear surrounding this particular strain is simply manufactured by the media. If the flu vaccine reduces the chance of getting the other 15-20 strains of flu by a significant amount, but doubles your risk of this particular strain, you still come out ahead.
However, most people should not even consider getting a flu shot in the first place. If you are between the ages of ~15 and ~60, and are in general good health, you should not get the flu shot. It terrifies me when I see flu shots being given out to students at local schools and colleges. These are the people who have absolutely zero risk of dying from the flu. None. Even if it leads to pneumonia, there is only a risk of death if proper medical treatment is not given. The worst that can happen is, well, that they catch the flu for a week or so.
The flu shot, on the other hand, can be extremely dangerous. My aunt was a nurse, and thus was required by her job to take the flu shot every year. She had been taking them for nearly a decade when, in her mid-thirties, she was paralyzed from the waist down by the side-effects of the flu shot. Had she not taken the shot, the worst that would have happened to her would have been simply getting the flu. She got a large settlement from the vaccine manufacturer and her employer. It was a rather fast process, as they knew beforehand that a certain percentage of people who take the flu shot would have this reaction. The cost of the settlements is simply rolled in to the cost of the vaccine. A couple of years later, a friend of the family suffered similar complications from the flu shot, and died. He was only 28 at the time, and in perfect health. Had he not taken the shot, the worst that would have happened to him would have been simply getting the flu.
The results of this study are interesting, but they make little difference. The vast majority of people should not be getting the flu shot in the first place. Taking it is simply rolling the dice unnecessarily. For those who are very young or old, the risks from the flu shot and the risks from the flu itself start to even out. In that case, the shot may indeed be a better idea. The results of this study do not change that fact.
Forget about the ideological wars surrounding open source for a moment. The simple fact of the matter is that open source saves significant amounts of time and money for developers, regardless of the license used for the code itself or on the platform it is developed for. As we all know, developers (developers developers) are central to Microsoft's business success. This new foundation can only improve the Windows application ecosystem, so it makes perfect sense for more than just tax reasons.
It sure as hell is Christianity holding back the space program. It all has to do with their long-term view of humanity's future:
Atheists realize that every species becomes either space-faring, or extinct. The Earth will not be around forever.
Christians believe that they will be abducted by a sky-zombie and taken to fairy-land. It says so right in this book!
Their views on space funding make sense when you understand where they are coming from, but that doesn't make it a rational or valid stance.
Yes, by BPM I was referring to the DDR setting used to control the speed at which the notes flow past the screen. The reason that it must be turned up for higher difficulty songs has less to do with the number of notes on the screen at once, and more to do with the amount of separation between them. At low speeds, there are not enough vertical pixels separating the notes to distinguish the order that they are actually coming in, and whether they are simultaneous (jumps) or not. When played at "normal" speeds, the notes will even overlap each other making a solid "wall" that is nearly impossible to work out, even if you were to pause the game and dissect the screen at your leisure.
I've spent a lot of time comparing how my rhythm games perform on various CRTs and LCDs, and I can tell you that the experience is orders of magnitude better on a CRT. However, if you're playing at low difficulties (1-10 steps) or low BPM (500 or so), then you are probably okay with an LCD. This range encompasses essentially all play that is done with your feet, so if you are physically dancing to your rhythm games, then by all means go for it. However, if you are playing rhythm games with your fingers on a keyboard or pad of some kind, you will find that it becomes completely unplayable on an LCD. The extra latency from the LCD combined with the very small amount of time that each arrow is on screen when playing on a high BPM (which is required for high-level play) makes it essentially impossible for a human player to even complete a difficult song.
I think that this stems primarily from a greater scientific understanding of the world around us. We hammered out a significantly more accurate picture of the universe with the development of quantum electrodynamics and relativity in the first half of the 20th century than the classical physics model that previous scientists and engineers had to work with. If you have a good idea how the universe works from the ground up, it becomes much simpler to predict what kinds of technologies can and will be invented in the future, and what form they will take. As the author states, the biggest surprise left lies in the creative implementation of those devices.
The "twice the size of Texas" figure is the lower-bound, conservative estimate. According to Wikipedia, the patch is estimated to be between 0.41% to 8.1% of the size of the Pacific Ocean. Also, the reason that this patch exists in the first place is because the North Pacific Gyre acts to collect debris (both biological and man-made) from around the entire Ocean. While still a relatively small area in size, it is incredibly important to the overall food chain due to the abundance of organisms sustained by the biomass collected by these currents.
The vast, vast majority of the trash contained in this "garbage patch" is composed of particulates far too small for the eye to see, suspended below the surface. Cleaning it up would require a large number of autonomous floating machines with, essentially, portable water treatment plants on board. All of these suggestions about fishing boats running around and scooping up plastic bottles out of the ocean is complete nonsense.
Imagine trying to filter the dirt out of a muddy lake. Extrapolate that to an area of the ocean a few times larger than the state of Texas, and you can begin to envision the magnitude of the solution required.
If the telecoms take this money, they will most likely be required to actually upgrade their infrastructure. The telecoms do not want to upgrade their infrastructure, as this would allow their competitors to eat away at their marketshare. What's the easiest way to stop people from using Skype, Netflix, Hulu, etc? Give them shitty internet speeds with low bandwidth caps.
If the buggy whip companies had owned the roads, they wouldn't take a government bailout to pave them for cars, either.
Windows has never played nice with other operating systems one the same machine. The first rule of multiple-booting has always been "install Windows first".
From what my EMT friends have told me, many hospitals are nearly permanently on "divert" status. Whenever a hospital is nearly full of patients (and many, particularly in large cities, almost always are) or their ability to accept and treat people is negatively impacted in some way (such as in this case), they go into divert status. This doesn't mean that they turn away people who come in for treatment, as anyone who comes in the door is still accepted. All it means that when an EMT picks up a patient and they see that one hospital is 12 minutes away, while another is 10 minutes away but on divert status, they may choose to go to the first hospital. If the patient is in critical condition and every minute matters, however, they will still go to the second for treatment. It's a logical measure that helps to ensure that everyone is treated in the most efficient manner.
You clearly did not fly with a competent group of players. In goonfleet, we recognize that our newbies are incredibly valuable and do everything that we can to keep them in fleets. You can, in fact, be incredibly useful in pvp from day one, as long as you are not trying to do it on your own (you know, second M in MMORPG). A week-old newbie can fly a cheap tackling cruiser (~2m after insurance and modules, so we give them out for free) with the health of a battleship that can be nigh-impossible to shake off. For a day or two of training and a few million more, they can do the same thing with a battlecruiser and start doing appreciable damage as well. Even when these things get blown up quickly, that's a battleship's worth of damage that our other players didn't take, which makes them well worth bringing. As far as making money goes, older players (in 0.0) don't salvage their wrecks when ratting because it slows down their isk/hour if they have good skills. We are always willing to let new players "hoover" behind us and keep whatever they want, and they end up making about 60-70% as much money as a max-skilled ratting pilot. Find me another game that allows a day 1 player to farm money at more than 60-70% of a veteran's rate, and then you can come back and complain about EVE.
Catching up with other players is not as hopeless as you make it out to be, either. You can have perfect skills for most any sub-capital ship in about 6 months, and past that point there is nothing you can do to make it better. Older players simply have the ability to fly more types of ships well, but you can still only fly one at a time so it makes little difference in actual encounters. If EVE had traditional "levels" like in other MMOs, you wouldn't complain that your level 5 character couldn't kill a level 100 character. The grind in EVE takes about the same time on average to "max out" a "class" as a regular MMO. Sure, powergamers can't knock it out in a week, but as you mentioned character purchasing is possible through legal channels in EVE, so if you really want to speed it up then you can grind for money (instead of EXP) and buy that character you want.
I'm a member of Goonswarm, both the largest alliance in EVE and the one whose reputation for meta-gaming might persuade you to think that we would use the CSM to give ourselves an advantage. While we openly admit to working as a group to get people into the CSM (we have enough votes to get 1-2 every time), as far as I know we haven't even tried to use it for our own political advantage because it would be almost impossible. What kind of change could we possibly propose that would benefit us over our enemies? Asking them to do something like improving the quality of the space we live in (which is the best in the game, anyway) would be transparent and silly. At best, we can (and do) ask them to fix some of the absolutely broken 0.0 mechanics such as POS setup times, titans, broken loot tables, among other things. While this does benefit us as an 0.0 alliance, all of our enemies are 0.0 alliances as well, so there is no real advantage gained. 0.0 alliances are not in direct competition with low-sec or empire alliances, so there is no advantage gained there, either. Of course, we also push for changes that affect the entire population, such as fixing broken ship types (probably half are worthless) and general balance tweaks (ewar springs to mind as the recent example).
I'm not saying that we wouldn't exploit the CSM for our own gain, but it just doesn't have the potential for doing so.
I'd say that one of the main problems is that it is close to impossible to attract competent replacements with the incredibly low salaries that we offer to teachers. Many(most) teachers in the public school system are nothing but glorified babysitters. You get what you pay for.
You clearly have not tried to play rhythm or fighting games with an LCD. When we are talking about single-frame (~15ms) input windows, the 10-50ms disparity between a CRT and LCD is the difference between hitting the inputs correctly and making the game completely unplayable. Yes, this applies to "2ms" response time LCDs as well. They have not improved, and it is unlikely that they will in the future.
This does nothing to prevent spam from giants such as gmail, hotmail, etc. who get their captchas broken. You can't blacklist them. It would be a good idea if everyone ran their own email servers, but they do not.
I bought Audiosurf for one friend of mine, and the Orange Box for another through Steam this past Christmas. This is an explicit feature.