OrbWeaver

...where you can enjoy a nice dose of ionising radiation to mask the effects of all those Earthly toxins.

I don't do travelling at all, because I can't be bothered with the hassle and risk. I was mentioning this to a colleague, and saying how I did not want to go to some country and find myself arrested for some ridiculous law that I did not even know about and held without trial with no legal rights - thinking of places like Iran or Saudi Arabia. Her response: "You don't have to go to America."

I know, how about a semitransparent pop-up menu with a series of text options that appears whenever you approach an interactive object. Even better, let's devote the rightmost quarter of the screen to a permanently-visible inventory window with animated icons that could be dragged-and-dropped onto world objects in order to interact with them.

Are you sure that you get a better price/performance ratio by doing this, rather than just upgrading to a newer single graphics card? Two years down the road, the midrange single cards will probably be faster than your two-year-old SLI setup.

That is only partially true. There are areas of the brain that tend to deal with certain abilities in a developed person, but this is not as fixed as you might think. For example, in most people the left hemisphere deals with rational and deductive thought, as well as language. If you sustain an injury to the left hemisphere then you will almost certainly suffer a partial loss of these abilities. However, a hemiplegic who is born with only a functioning right hemisphere is still capable of developing language skills, as the right hemisphere takes over the duties that would normally arise in the left. Similarly, the part of the brain that processes auditory information can learn to deal with visual information if it is reconnected so as to receive data from the eyes instead of the ears. It seems likely that instead of being a compartmentalised set of discrete processing units, the brain is in fact a giant network that can adapt its function on the basis of the information that is fed to it (although this ability does deteriorate with age).

Check the refresh rate. On a CRT I can't stand anything less than 85 Hz, although some people don't even notice when it's 60 Hz.

Yeah, what the hell is the point? In six months to a year they will be releasing single graphics cards with the same performance as this 4-board setup, at a fraction of the price.

He doesn't demonstrate that, because it is not true. There is nothing that couldn't have evolved, and that is a fact. Anybody claiming otherwise doesn't understand evolutionary theory. That is not to say that evolution itself is a fact, obviously it is a theory and I.D. could be true. However the common assertion that evolution cannot account for certain things is just propaganda and is not supported by science.

I agree, there are plenty of very intelligent people who hold religious beliefs, including Creationism. They don't become idiots until they start ramming their beliefs down other people's throats, through legislation, war or other efforts.

Perhaps. Perhaps we are all in the Matrix and nothing really exists anyway. It throws out the idea that they were designed by a "perfect" designer, which is what God is assumed to be. It is possible that they could have been designed by a less-than-perfect designer, such as a junior member of an alien master race, but there is no reason to believe such without any evidence. Irrelevant, the designers of Dromed were never held to be perfect or omnipotent. If humans can devolve over time, why can they not evolve overtime? Creationism maintains that humans have not changed since they were created, not that they can change but only in one direction. That is a very emotional reaction. If your beliefs are sound it does not matter whether other people agree with them or not. If you refuse to work with people who don't share your beliefs, then that suggests that the beliefs are not all that secure in the first place.

Commercial infringement tends to be slapped down hard, and so it should be. True, but renting is not free. I don't feel bad about ripping rented movies (for personal use, I never share anything) because I have already paid for the rental which I think is an appropriate price for a personal copy of a movie, rather than the retail price which is artificially inflated.

Technically I think it is illegal just about everywhere, but nobody has ever been successfully convicted because of it.

In the alpha 0.002 build the rope arrows seem to be of fixed length. Is this a temporary thing or are they going to be like this in the real game? I actually quite like the fixed length idea, as it makes it more challenging to position the arrow correctly and is more realistic since there is no magic rope extension involved.

Schools have never been intended to produce "intelligent" people. They are there to get people into employment and therefore paying taxes to the government. Whether this is best achieved through manual labour, academic subjects or "vocational skills" depends on the economy at the time.

I always like it when they say "we do not accept return or refund". No, but the shop has to by law, and once they start losing money this way they will stop stocking your broken CDs.

I think the problem with such travel is not the actual distance, but the amount of fuel needed to accelerate to that sort of speed (which increases the mass of the craft, therefore requiring even more fuel, and so on).

It's a goddamn computer game, not a professional engineering simulation. If it requires a manual to understand the interface there is something seriously wrong with the design.

Normally frobbing something does not involve the loss of resources or equipment, unless the resource was selected in the inventory first. Changing this dynamic is likely to cause considerable confusion to users. "Oh look, I can put out all these torces by frobbing them. Hey, where did my water arrows go?".

Not to mention the noisy explosions and constant whooshing of spacecraft.

All motion is relative, there is no such thing as absolute motion. Therefore the "path" taken by any object will be different depending on your frame of reference.

Don't assume that because I didn't mention it, I wasn't aware of it. Indeed. Although if you want to be picky, the Earth still does orbit "around the Sun", just not around the Sun's centre of mass. Which is why I don't celebrate any such event. I don't see the point in celebrating something which happens regularly and affects everyone, the only things worth celebrating in my view are significant one-off achievements (getting promoted, graduation, releasing the Dark Mod, whatever is of value to the individual concerned).

The time it takes for the Earth to complete a single orbit around the Sun.

Centuries and milleniums are just artefacts of the human calendar and counting system. At least years have an actual astronomical basis. Not that I celebrate any of them.

Playing poker does not have to involve gambling.

They had a large physical brain-size, but I am not aware of any evidence that they were actually more intelligent than other hominids.