Filing date was 2003 according to TFA, but you apparently noticed that.
In some respects, podcasting even pre-dates that - MP3.com - the old one that hosted indie artists in the late 1990s-early 2000s - used to have download-able fan created setlists and some included DJs (so it was a music podcast in everything but name and RSS feed). You could either stream or download this content, because everything on that site could be downloaded free (the business model was selling CD quality recordings of those artists, but apparently not enough people did).
I used to listen to some of these setlists on my MP3 player in the late 1990s, but I certainly didn't think I had adopted a patentable idea - seemed logical. I download MP3 content. I have MP3 player. I add 1+1... I play MP3 content on portable player. How is this not obvious?
Well, I wouldn't say MS ALWAYS had a brilliant sales department. That Applesoft BASIC cassette they show on Gizmodo is kind of humorous - MS sold Applesoft BASIC to Apple for a flat $31000 fee including source. Apple sold 25000 units in 1978 and about 100000 in 1979, meaning even by1979 Apple paid less than a quarter of a penny per copy. MS then bought back the source, but I don't remember ever hearing what they paid.
A profitable business scheme for Microsoft is calling an update to a product by an entirely new name.
like Apple.
Another profitable scheme is charging the full price for an upgrade, as though it is a totally new product.
like Apple
My understanding is that releasing versions of products that aren't finished is also profitable for Microsoft, because then most customers buy new versions immediately. Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows ME, and DOS 3.0 are three examples I think of immediately.
You missed Windows 1.0, Windows 2.0, and Windows 3.0. 3.11 was the first usable version of Windows IMO, and the most people would have skipped 95 if it wasn't a huge improvement (and was). I used DR-DOS and GEM mostly, so I didn't really follow the MS-DOS until 3.11 when it was hard to avoid. NT was always pretty solid, even 3.1 and 3.51. Windows 7 rc1 seems very solid, so I expect the release to be, as well.
Apple has pissed me off too much hardware-wise to upgrade, especially in graphics cards, so I can't compare them anymore, but usually their OS is rock-solid. I can't even run my computer as a hackintosh because my nearly year old graphics card is better than the one you get in their $3000+ machine. I will not buy a machine that can't be upgraded that isn't called a laptop or notebook, and that means a sticker shock $2499 starting. If I ever buy another Apple, it will be a laptop.
There were numerous bad Linux releases, especially in the early years (for instance, Softlanding sucked unless you had very specific hardware - thankfully the Slackware fixed most of the problems), too, so it isn't just Microsoft, but most of the trusted Linux vendors are pretty solid. I still hear of a slip-up here or there causing problems on mostly cutting edge distributions (like GenToo).
DX11 includes the following: Designed for multicore CPUs (DX10 and before were designed to work with a single CPU) Hardware tessellation (Hull Shader, Domain Shader, and Tessellator) Improved texture compression (the demo I saw focused on HDR) Shader Model 5.0 (this was glossed over, so I don't know what is in it) Increased max texture size (something like 4096x4096 is the current limit and they're bumping it to 16k.) Compute Shader (essentially General Purpose GPU like CUDA)
Some of this stuff sounds pretty cool - I'm mostly interested in the Tessellation shaders, especially if they work (geometry shader was terrible for tessellating) and I'm hoping OpenGL also picks up at least that feature (which will be about 9 years later at the rate they're adopting stuff into core right now...).
Technically, GDI is a renderer toolkit like DirectX (in the Apple world, it would be Quickdraw) - with Vista you mean Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) used by Desktop Window Manager (DWM). And yes, WDDM 1.1 supports hardware compositing and is included in Windows 7.
Vista was originally supposed to have Desktop Compositing Engine (DCE) with 3 modes, but the one that disabled software render mode was not released, only the hybrid and software only ones were. DCE was rebranded DWM prior to release, probably just to confuse us old UNIX sorts who used dwm.
DWM in Vista is actually a lot like Quartz compositor on mac - draws in software and then sends to hardware to add the whiz-bang effects. It shouldn't use twice the memory on laptops unless the laptop is using a shared memory AGP. DWM on Windows 7 is like Quartz Extreme on mac (which was released in 2002, so yes, as others have said, they are 7 years behind Apple there).
If you define it that way, Windows 95 to 98 to ME or Windows 2000 to Windows XP would be service packs. If you use kernel as your basis, Apple is worse - OS X.0 - X.5 are all based on bumps in xnu rather than entirely new kernels.
I've enjoyed the Windows 7 beta to tell the truth. The driver model is the same as Vista, so the transition was easier (all my hardware worked out of the box) and it looks like they focused their attention on ease-of-use features and lowering the memory footprint. I still have pretty slow performance from OpenGL in windowed mode, which is really strange because I get faster framerates in a VM running Linux, though it could be driver related since I've yet to do performance analysis. The context switching performance hit is much lower on this desktop than on my laptop (10-20% rather than 40+%).
If I remember correctly, in Japan breasts and testicles are perfectly fine to show, but other genitalia are strictly forbidden. There was a kids show where opossums blew up their testicles and fought with them, or something like that, and I've seen non-hentai anime with breasts (but no sex) that I believe was aimed at teens.
Some people believe the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot exist even without any real evidence, and yes, that seems silly (for a religious analogy), but how about life on other planets? We don't have any proof of it, but since we don't really understand our universe we can't entirely discount it.
In HP Lovecraft's "From Beyond" the scientists didn't believe in monsters until they saw them, but to see them they needed special equipment. Is it therefore not rational that monsters may be under the bed because we don't understand enough about the universe to see them? How about dimensions past space-time (which would be alternate timelines) - we can't perceive them, don't know for sure that they're there, but are they a possibility? Some believe yes, some believe no - you need to take that on faith.
In English, if you're talking about the monotheistic God you need to capitalize the G, as it is either a name like Bob or Edna or a formal title like the President of the United States (vs, say, the president of Enron). Lowercase g is used for polytheistic beliefs - Zeus is a god, Jupiter is a god. Now if God had a proper name like Balthazar Copernicus Socrates the Third, we may be able to use god, depending on context (say, BCS the Third is the only god vs God is BCS the Third).
Personally, I believe if there is a God, it is not manifest the way most religions believe - existence is God or the universe itself is God. I also believe that such a God would not want or need to be worshiped (why would it need to?). I therefore also don't believe I am a true Atheist or Agnostic though I'd probably lean toward Agnostic.
Having lived in the University of Minnesota Duluth tunnel system for two years (before transferring) where there is no need to go outside, ever, I can assure you that mole people do in fact exist. As for the rest of those, they're a bunch of hooey.
Not to mention any time taken for pulling permits, which are required for most new work and some replacement work. It'd be hilarious if the plumbers union blocked the repair of the ISS toilet because a union plumber isn't doing the work, but I doubt that will happen - its a Russian built toilet.
The part that bugs me is city inspectors (the reason for the permit) rarely check the work done - they just want the money. My wife's duplex obviously didn't get inspected properly because both plumbing and electrical work violated 1977 code (the year when it was built). The stove wiring alone is grounds to sue (12 gauge wire for a 220V - the casing was already melted in some places when I found it), but the construction company went under in the 1980s. About 3/4 of the outlets had the wrong polarity, as well. The plumbing wasn't as bad, but there were several improperly done connections like ABS to PVC glue connections, which probably was done by the previous homeowner and not the home builder, but a couple of those connections I had to tear down ceiling in the basement to see, so I'm not sure (actually, I would have never noticed, but the spray ceiling had to be torn down to meet code that requires accessibility to plumbing).
When the duplex got converted to rental property the inspector found over 200 code violations, and only about 30 of them were newer than 1977 (stuff like backflow valves). We had a month when the property was both homestead and rental so I pulled permits and did most of the work, saving about $2400 (and there are some really dumb permits - changing the bathroom ceiling fan required both an electrical and mechanical permit even though the mechanical part is self contained - thankfully I only had to pull one permit for all the work). If I did the work today I'd need to legally call a plumber or electrician (not that I do - I risk the $1000 fine and/or jail time to fix silly stuff like a toilet running, and yes, by law I need to call a plumber for that because it is rental property).
Planeshift is dubiously open source - all the content is under a proprietary license and anybody contributing content is considered "work for hire." The excuse is they didn't want people rebranding and/or profiting from the game, but it really drove a rift in the developer ranks. Engine source code is the only thing still GPL (from what I recall, they ditched any assets from people that didn't agree to the license switch, but I was so far disassociated from the project by that time I didn't care).
Most people do some training of their cats - I don't know of many cats that do their business, say, on the couch rather than in a litter box.
I admit, I personally have never trained one, but that has more to do with allergies... my scratch test was so severe that it overran about half the other tests and ran over my shoulder (I maxed the scale and then some). Basically, cat spit=fatality for me (and yes, it is their saliva that causes the allergic reaction, not their hair as is popularly believed). Heck, I have allergic reactions to people that have come into contact with cats (which is practically everybody).
Huh? Venus has a dense atmosphere - much denser than Earth's (something like being under 1km of water at the surface). I believe you meant lost its water, not atmosphere. While Venus is closer to the sun than Earth, it gets about one quarter the sunlight of Mercury yet has a higher maximum surface temperature to to the greenhouse gas effect.
So beyond just the heat, a human would need either liquid breathing or a rigid articulated pressure controlled suit, and liquid breathing has plenty of issues for any long-term use. Something like the Libelle G-suit (body is in a rigid suit immersed in liquid, but still breathing air - the name means Dragonfly in German and is based on them) would probably not work for survival on Venus, but it could be used for higher acceleration to get there (or to Mars).
The G series is more a gaming mouse series, and I believe have macro-able buttons. The Logitech Revolutions are geared more toward productivity/programmers, but tend to be both heavier and spendy and have features that are Windows only, so I would probably only recommend them if you spend the majority of your time in Windows (and I don't, actually, so this probably wasn't the best mouse for me). The MX revolution thumb wheel is fun on Windows 7 (and probably Vista, but I don't have Vista on that switchbox) - basically an alt-tab, but then you use the scroll wheel to switch apps and it tends to be vastly faster than alt-tab. I've used mine for gaming and it seems decent, but I'm sure a dedicated gaming mouse would destroy it (something I don't really care about - I'm a casual gamer).
On my laptop I use a previous generation VX Nano (the new generation has a tiny receiver, but lists about $20 more expensive than the one I bought on sale a couple of years ago). The mouse is lightweight and two AAA batteries last for months, even with heavy use. The V550 is similar, cheaper, but has less buttons.
Funny that nethack and Diablo 1 and 2 are mentioned in the same sentence - Diablo 1 was originally intended to be a turn based, graphical rogue/hack clone, but when they experimented with realtime they found it extremely fun and addictive and thus the game evolved into what it ended up. Having worked for another game company, I can tell you we'd have never been given the chance to do experimental changes like that - if it didn't fit into the original design document, it didn't go into the game (and they tossed games entirely rather than changing them to make them fun).
To me, gameplay often makes or breaks a game, as well. I played Wing Commander on the PC and absolutely loved it, but Super Wing Commander on the mac was terrible, despite updated graphics. Why? the mouse controls were awful, and the joystick controls mediocre (a cheap joystick may have been better than the flightstick like I had). Really it was almost unplayable. Civilization was just the opposite - while civ 1 was good on the PC, the mac version was vastly better. Not only were the graphics vastly improved (256 colors vs 16), but it included numerous easy-access convenience features like civpedia.
As far as graphical realism goes, I don't think there is a wrong answer - Dali did cubism, surrealism, dada, sculpture and even realism and animation (Destino, with Disney), Picasso did cubism, drawings and ceramics, Disney did cel shading and animation. All created fantastic pieces of art in their own respect.
As far as the original post goes, effects like true radiosity are still a ways off, though they can be approximated. True radiosity rendered in realtime would be extremely expensive, even in simple scenes - when I used it with ray tracing, my ray tracing was about 100x slower - note that I was using a 100MHz MIPS processor at the time and it took about 7 hours to render my scene, and I believe the scene had about 200 objects (one of my teammates wrote the shape code and the scene, another wrote the ray tracer, and I wrote the radiosity code).
IMO, IE's main problem is entirely caused by the lack of:before and:after elements for curvy corners, making sites like slashdot dangerous to read because you can easily poke an eye out on the sharp corners if you aren't careful. Curvy corners can also be also done using browser specific CSS -moz-border-radius or -webkit-border-radius tags, but even IE8 lacks this.
You missed a couple of points - LEDs are expensive and are generally directional. Phosphor spread of light is more even than magnetic ballast fluorescent, but electronic ballast (like most compact fluorescents) is generally better because it switches much faster (20000+ times per second vs 100-120 changes a second [50-60Hz, a flicker that is noticeable by some people, like 60Hz monitors]). The flicker and buzz you report from cheap CFLs is probably due to using magnetic ballast.
LED lights also vary widely - it is possible to create white light without a phosphor using LEDs, but the patents on blue LEDs (owned by Nichia corp of Japan, if I recall correctly) make this restrictive (I had also heard they charge astronomical fees for use of this patent, but that may or not be true).
In the US both this tech and Halogens are doomed - by 2020 bulb efficiency has to be around 70% and neither halogens or this bulb meet it. I'm pretty sure the 70% was chosen because fluorescent bulbs hit that number and it would essentially require all bulbs to be that (note that the law only applies to bulbs that are ~40 < n < 250 watt), but I'm hoping LED tech improves before then (if you've used LED bulbs, you know what I mean - dim and not very omnidirectional - mine also is a bit blue, being a blue light on a poorly spread white phosphor, but its what I get for buying a relatively cheap bulb) because I dislike fluorescent lighting.
You're talking about so-called Hard Science Fiction - sci-fi based on real science and theoretical possibilities, as opposed to soft sci-fi, which is often called Space Opera.
Cyberpunk didn't really fall into either hard sci-fi or space opera, which is probably why it got its own genre. The genre existed long before the term was coined, however - Blade Runner was filmed in 1981 and loosely based on a 1960s novel, but the term cyberpunk wasn't coined until 1983 (by Bruce Bethke).
In the 1980s almost every cyberpunk novel I read was derivative from Neuromancer, including Psychodrome (Hawke, focusing on simstim stars), Snow Crash (Stephenson, derivative in many ways), Islands in the Net (Sterling, cyberspace, setting in general). I think it wasn't until the mid-1990s where I read anything really original that still fell into the cyberpunk genre IMO (the excellent book the Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson - but this is often called postcyberpunk). Still, Neuromancer covered a lot of bases, so there was a lot of space for original material, even if it was generally derivative. I personally find Neuromancer as a so-so novel from a writing standpoint, but the vision at the time was so in-your-face to typical sci-fi (read Asimov and you'll understand) that it was a welcome and needed change.
Personally, I never had bad service with Comcast - they answered their phones within 20-30 minutes at the worst and usually had a quick fix for any problems (When I worked for Bell Atlantic our Christmas hold times hit 50-60 minutes due to staffing issues, and even though those jobs are in India now [and BA was absorbed by GTE and became Verizon], India has similar issues around Diwali). Comcast did have lots of outages and my area and was supersaturated making for horrific prime-time ping and data rates from about 3PM-10PM, but they fixed that with new fiber lines and boosted speeds within weeks after I left them. Incidentally, I left them not because of service issues, but because they didn't offer static IPs and I was traveling a lot and wanted access to my home machine while on the road.
As much as I dislike monopolies and root for the underdog, I personally feel Comcast and Verizon are leading the market in driving up speeds and costs down - Qwest and AT&T are market followers and only upgrade their networks or cut prices when competition does so first. I also feel Comcast has the unfair advantage - using cable monopoly rights and inflated prices they can subsidize their infrastructure better (and if you don't think their prices are inflated, compare them to satellite, which does have competition). Verizon's main advantage is being the regional bell in a densely populated area. Verizon and AT&T's fierce competition in the cell phone industry means the margins are probably tighter there.
Ultimate Frisbee is a nerd sport, kinda like adult kickball. Its not that nerds can't play sports, its just they can't play directly competitive sports like basketball, rugby, football (American or non-US soccer - in the US soccer is a nerd sport, which is why it isn't taken seriously).
Jocks and nerds both play golf. Hippie stoner nerds play disc golf. Yes, that's stereotyping, but hey, isn't that what jock and nerd is all about?
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Filing date was 2003 according to TFA, but you apparently noticed that.
In some respects, podcasting even pre-dates that - MP3.com - the old one that hosted indie artists in the late 1990s-early 2000s - used to have download-able fan created setlists and some included DJs (so it was a music podcast in everything but name and RSS feed). You could either stream or download this content, because everything on that site could be downloaded free (the business model was selling CD quality recordings of those artists, but apparently not enough people did).
I used to listen to some of these setlists on my MP3 player in the late 1990s, but I certainly didn't think I had adopted a patentable idea - seemed logical. I download MP3 content. I have MP3 player. I add 1+1... I play MP3 content on portable player. How is this not obvious?
Well, I wouldn't say MS ALWAYS had a brilliant sales department. That Applesoft BASIC cassette they show on Gizmodo is kind of humorous - MS sold Applesoft BASIC to Apple for a flat $31000 fee including source. Apple sold 25000 units in 1978 and about 100000 in 1979, meaning even by1979 Apple paid less than a quarter of a penny per copy. MS then bought back the source, but I don't remember ever hearing what they paid.
A profitable business scheme for Microsoft is calling an update to a product
by an entirely new name.
like Apple.
Another profitable scheme is charging the full price for an upgrade,
as though it is a totally new product.
like Apple
My understanding is that releasing versions of products that aren't
finished is also profitable for Microsoft, because then most customers buy new
versions immediately. Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows ME, and DOS 3.0 are
three examples I think of immediately.
You missed Windows 1.0, Windows 2.0, and Windows 3.0. 3.11 was the first usable version of Windows IMO, and the most people would have skipped 95 if it wasn't a huge improvement (and was). I used DR-DOS and GEM mostly, so I didn't really follow the MS-DOS until 3.11 when it was hard to avoid. NT was always pretty solid, even 3.1 and 3.51. Windows 7 rc1 seems very solid, so I expect the release to be, as well.
Apple has pissed me off too much hardware-wise to upgrade, especially in graphics cards, so I can't compare them anymore, but usually their OS is rock-solid. I can't even run my computer as a hackintosh because my nearly year old graphics card is better than the one you get in their $3000+ machine. I will not buy a machine that can't be upgraded that isn't called a laptop or notebook, and that means a sticker shock $2499 starting. If I ever buy another Apple, it will be a laptop.
There were numerous bad Linux releases, especially in the early years (for instance, Softlanding sucked unless you had very specific hardware - thankfully the Slackware fixed most of the problems), too, so it isn't just Microsoft, but most of the trusted Linux vendors are pretty solid. I still hear of a slip-up here or there causing problems on mostly cutting edge distributions (like GenToo).
DX11 includes the following:
Designed for multicore CPUs (DX10 and before were designed to work with a single CPU)
Hardware tessellation (Hull Shader, Domain Shader, and Tessellator)
Improved texture compression (the demo I saw focused on HDR)
Shader Model 5.0 (this was glossed over, so I don't know what is in it)
Increased max texture size (something like 4096x4096 is the current limit and they're bumping it to 16k.)
Compute Shader (essentially General Purpose GPU like CUDA)
Some of this stuff sounds pretty cool - I'm mostly interested in the Tessellation shaders, especially if they work (geometry shader was terrible for tessellating) and I'm hoping OpenGL also picks up at least that feature (which will be about 9 years later at the rate they're adopting stuff into core right now...).
Technically, GDI is a renderer toolkit like DirectX (in the Apple world, it would be Quickdraw) - with Vista you mean Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) used by Desktop Window Manager (DWM). And yes, WDDM 1.1 supports hardware compositing and is included in Windows 7.
Vista was originally supposed to have Desktop Compositing Engine (DCE) with 3 modes, but the one that disabled software render mode was not released, only the hybrid and software only ones were. DCE was rebranded DWM prior to release, probably just to confuse us old UNIX sorts who used dwm.
DWM in Vista is actually a lot like Quartz compositor on mac - draws in software and then sends to hardware to add the whiz-bang effects. It shouldn't use twice the memory on laptops unless the laptop is using a shared memory AGP. DWM on Windows 7 is like Quartz Extreme on mac (which was released in 2002, so yes, as others have said, they are 7 years behind Apple there).
If you define it that way, Windows 95 to 98 to ME or Windows 2000 to Windows XP would be service packs. If you use kernel as your basis, Apple is worse - OS X.0 - X.5 are all based on bumps in xnu rather than entirely new kernels.
I've enjoyed the Windows 7 beta to tell the truth. The driver model is the same as Vista, so the transition was easier (all my hardware worked out of the box) and it looks like they focused their attention on ease-of-use features and lowering the memory footprint. I still have pretty slow performance from OpenGL in windowed mode, which is really strange because I get faster framerates in a VM running Linux, though it could be driver related since I've yet to do performance analysis. The context switching performance hit is much lower on this desktop than on my laptop (10-20% rather than 40+%).
If I remember correctly, in Japan breasts and testicles are perfectly fine to show, but other genitalia are strictly forbidden. There was a kids show where opossums blew up their testicles and fought with them, or something like that, and I've seen non-hentai anime with breasts (but no sex) that I believe was aimed at teens.
Some people believe the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot exist even without any real evidence, and yes, that seems silly (for a religious analogy), but how about life on other planets? We don't have any proof of it, but since we don't really understand our universe we can't entirely discount it.
In HP Lovecraft's "From Beyond" the scientists didn't believe in monsters until they saw them, but to see them they needed special equipment. Is it therefore not rational that monsters may be under the bed because we don't understand enough about the universe to see them? How about dimensions past space-time (which would be alternate timelines) - we can't perceive them, don't know for sure that they're there, but are they a possibility? Some believe yes, some believe no - you need to take that on faith.
In English, if you're talking about the monotheistic God you need to capitalize the G, as it is either a name like Bob or Edna or a formal title like the President of the United States (vs, say, the president of Enron). Lowercase g is used for polytheistic beliefs - Zeus is a god, Jupiter is a god. Now if God had a proper name like Balthazar Copernicus Socrates the Third, we may be able to use god, depending on context (say, BCS the Third is the only god vs God is BCS the Third).
Personally, I believe if there is a God, it is not manifest the way most religions believe - existence is God or the universe itself is God. I also believe that such a God would not want or need to be worshiped (why would it need to?). I therefore also don't believe I am a true Atheist or Agnostic though I'd probably lean toward Agnostic.
Having lived in the University of Minnesota Duluth tunnel system for two years (before transferring) where there is no need to go outside, ever, I can assure you that mole people do in fact exist. As for the rest of those, they're a bunch of hooey.
Not to mention any time taken for pulling permits, which are required for most new work and some replacement work. It'd be hilarious if the plumbers union blocked the repair of the ISS toilet because a union plumber isn't doing the work, but I doubt that will happen - its a Russian built toilet.
The part that bugs me is city inspectors (the reason for the permit) rarely check the work done - they just want the money. My wife's duplex obviously didn't get inspected properly because both plumbing and electrical work violated 1977 code (the year when it was built). The stove wiring alone is grounds to sue (12 gauge wire for a 220V - the casing was already melted in some places when I found it), but the construction company went under in the 1980s. About 3/4 of the outlets had the wrong polarity, as well. The plumbing wasn't as bad, but there were several improperly done connections like ABS to PVC glue connections, which probably was done by the previous homeowner and not the home builder, but a couple of those connections I had to tear down ceiling in the basement to see, so I'm not sure (actually, I would have never noticed, but the spray ceiling had to be torn down to meet code that requires accessibility to plumbing).
When the duplex got converted to rental property the inspector found over 200 code violations, and only about 30 of them were newer than 1977 (stuff like backflow valves). We had a month when the property was both homestead and rental so I pulled permits and did most of the work, saving about $2400 (and there are some really dumb permits - changing the bathroom ceiling fan required both an electrical and mechanical permit even though the mechanical part is self contained - thankfully I only had to pull one permit for all the work). If I did the work today I'd need to legally call a plumber or electrician (not that I do - I risk the $1000 fine and/or jail time to fix silly stuff like a toilet running, and yes, by law I need to call a plumber for that because it is rental property).
If you're not familiar with fallout lore, see this
with my luck, I'd have gotten Vault 68.
kinda RadX and RadAway all rolled into one, but tagging already figured that out. Tim Cain and Co were prescient.
Planeshift is dubiously open source - all the content is under a proprietary license and anybody contributing content is considered "work for hire." The excuse is they didn't want people rebranding and/or profiting from the game, but it really drove a rift in the developer ranks. Engine source code is the only thing still GPL (from what I recall, they ditched any assets from people that didn't agree to the license switch, but I was so far disassociated from the project by that time I didn't care).
yeah - its in the tagline: from the real-reason-Palin-resigned dept.
Most people do some training of their cats - I don't know of many cats that do their business, say, on the couch rather than in a litter box.
I admit, I personally have never trained one, but that has more to do with allergies... my scratch test was so severe that it overran about half the other tests and ran over my shoulder (I maxed the scale and then some). Basically, cat spit=fatality for me (and yes, it is their saliva that causes the allergic reaction, not their hair as is popularly believed). Heck, I have allergic reactions to people that have come into contact with cats (which is practically everybody).
Huh? Venus has a dense atmosphere - much denser than Earth's (something like being under 1km of water at the surface). I believe you meant lost its water, not atmosphere. While Venus is closer to the sun than Earth, it gets about one quarter the sunlight of Mercury yet has a higher maximum surface temperature to to the greenhouse gas effect.
So beyond just the heat, a human would need either liquid breathing or a rigid articulated pressure controlled suit, and liquid breathing has plenty of issues for any long-term use. Something like the Libelle G-suit (body is in a rigid suit immersed in liquid, but still breathing air - the name means Dragonfly in German and is based on them) would probably not work for survival on Venus, but it could be used for higher acceleration to get there (or to Mars).
The G series is more a gaming mouse series, and I believe have macro-able buttons. The Logitech Revolutions are geared more toward productivity/programmers, but tend to be both heavier and spendy and have features that are Windows only, so I would probably only recommend them if you spend the majority of your time in Windows (and I don't, actually, so this probably wasn't the best mouse for me). The MX revolution thumb wheel is fun on Windows 7 (and probably Vista, but I don't have Vista on that switchbox) - basically an alt-tab, but then you use the scroll wheel to switch apps and it tends to be vastly faster than alt-tab. I've used mine for gaming and it seems decent, but I'm sure a dedicated gaming mouse would destroy it (something I don't really care about - I'm a casual gamer).
On my laptop I use a previous generation VX Nano (the new generation has a tiny receiver, but lists about $20 more expensive than the one I bought on sale a couple of years ago). The mouse is lightweight and two AAA batteries last for months, even with heavy use. The V550 is similar, cheaper, but has less buttons.
Funny that nethack and Diablo 1 and 2 are mentioned in the same sentence - Diablo 1 was originally intended to be a turn based, graphical rogue/hack clone, but when they experimented with realtime they found it extremely fun and addictive and thus the game evolved into what it ended up. Having worked for another game company, I can tell you we'd have never been given the chance to do experimental changes like that - if it didn't fit into the original design document, it didn't go into the game (and they tossed games entirely rather than changing them to make them fun).
To me, gameplay often makes or breaks a game, as well. I played Wing Commander on the PC and absolutely loved it, but Super Wing Commander on the mac was terrible, despite updated graphics. Why? the mouse controls were awful, and the joystick controls mediocre (a cheap joystick may have been better than the flightstick like I had). Really it was almost unplayable. Civilization was just the opposite - while civ 1 was good on the PC, the mac version was vastly better. Not only were the graphics vastly improved (256 colors vs 16), but it included numerous easy-access convenience features like civpedia.
As far as graphical realism goes, I don't think there is a wrong answer - Dali did cubism, surrealism, dada, sculpture and even realism and animation (Destino, with Disney), Picasso did cubism, drawings and ceramics, Disney did cel shading and animation. All created fantastic pieces of art in their own respect.
As far as the original post goes, effects like true radiosity are still a ways off, though they can be approximated. True radiosity rendered in realtime would be extremely expensive, even in simple scenes - when I used it with ray tracing, my ray tracing was about 100x slower - note that I was using a 100MHz MIPS processor at the time and it took about 7 hours to render my scene, and I believe the scene had about 200 objects (one of my teammates wrote the shape code and the scene, another wrote the ray tracer, and I wrote the radiosity code).
IMO, IE's main problem is entirely caused by the lack of :before and :after elements for curvy corners, making sites like slashdot dangerous to read because you can easily poke an eye out on the sharp corners if you aren't careful. Curvy corners can also be also done using browser specific CSS -moz-border-radius or -webkit-border-radius tags, but even IE8 lacks this.
You missed a couple of points - LEDs are expensive and are generally directional. Phosphor spread of light is more even than magnetic ballast fluorescent, but electronic ballast (like most compact fluorescents) is generally better because it switches much faster (20000+ times per second vs 100-120 changes a second [50-60Hz, a flicker that is noticeable by some people, like 60Hz monitors]). The flicker and buzz you report from cheap CFLs is probably due to using magnetic ballast.
LED lights also vary widely - it is possible to create white light without a phosphor using LEDs, but the patents on blue LEDs (owned by Nichia corp of Japan, if I recall correctly) make this restrictive (I had also heard they charge astronomical fees for use of this patent, but that may or not be true).
In the US both this tech and Halogens are doomed - by 2020 bulb efficiency has to be around 70% and neither halogens or this bulb meet it. I'm pretty sure the 70% was chosen because fluorescent bulbs hit that number and it would essentially require all bulbs to be that (note that the law only applies to bulbs that are ~40 < n < 250 watt), but I'm hoping LED tech improves before then (if you've used LED bulbs, you know what I mean - dim and not very omnidirectional - mine also is a bit blue, being a blue light on a poorly spread white phosphor, but its what I get for buying a relatively cheap bulb) because I dislike fluorescent lighting.
You're talking about so-called Hard Science Fiction - sci-fi based on real science and theoretical possibilities, as opposed to soft sci-fi, which is often called Space Opera.
Cyberpunk didn't really fall into either hard sci-fi or space opera, which is probably why it got its own genre. The genre existed long before the term was coined, however - Blade Runner was filmed in 1981 and loosely based on a 1960s novel, but the term cyberpunk wasn't coined until 1983 (by Bruce Bethke).
In the 1980s almost every cyberpunk novel I read was derivative from Neuromancer, including Psychodrome (Hawke, focusing on simstim stars), Snow Crash (Stephenson, derivative in many ways), Islands in the Net (Sterling, cyberspace, setting in general). I think it wasn't until the mid-1990s where I read anything really original that still fell into the cyberpunk genre IMO (the excellent book the Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson - but this is often called postcyberpunk). Still, Neuromancer covered a lot of bases, so there was a lot of space for original material, even if it was generally derivative. I personally find Neuromancer as a so-so novel from a writing standpoint, but the vision at the time was so in-your-face to typical sci-fi (read Asimov and you'll understand) that it was a welcome and needed change.
Personally, I never had bad service with Comcast - they answered their phones within 20-30 minutes at the worst and usually had a quick fix for any problems (When I worked for Bell Atlantic our Christmas hold times hit 50-60 minutes due to staffing issues, and even though those jobs are in India now [and BA was absorbed by GTE and became Verizon], India has similar issues around Diwali). Comcast did have lots of outages and my area and was supersaturated making for horrific prime-time ping and data rates from about 3PM-10PM, but they fixed that with new fiber lines and boosted speeds within weeks after I left them. Incidentally, I left them not because of service issues, but because they didn't offer static IPs and I was traveling a lot and wanted access to my home machine while on the road.
As much as I dislike monopolies and root for the underdog, I personally feel Comcast and Verizon are leading the market in driving up speeds and costs down - Qwest and AT&T are market followers and only upgrade their networks or cut prices when competition does so first. I also feel Comcast has the unfair advantage - using cable monopoly rights and inflated prices they can subsidize their infrastructure better (and if you don't think their prices are inflated, compare them to satellite, which does have competition). Verizon's main advantage is being the regional bell in a densely populated area. Verizon and AT&T's fierce competition in the cell phone industry means the margins are probably tighter there.
Ultimate Frisbee is a nerd sport, kinda like adult kickball. Its not that nerds can't play sports, its just they can't play directly competitive sports like basketball, rugby, football (American or non-US soccer - in the US soccer is a nerd sport, which is why it isn't taken seriously).
Jocks and nerds both play golf. Hippie stoner nerds play disc golf. Yes, that's stereotyping, but hey, isn't that what jock and nerd is all about?