Yup, I love their stuff about games that I've actually played. I spent literally zero hours thinking about purple rain. I spent hundreds of hours on many of these games. :-)

No, actually in the game Jensen never had problems because he was genetically engineered / modified to work with augmentations. That's a plot point in the game and has a side-quest of it's own. It's referred and referenced a number of times in the various notes/e-mails you find in the game. See the last screenshot…

Agreed - the Magneto energy bubble was rather weird and unbelievable. IMHO they also could have done something different with the cloaking device thing - gave him an invisible projection robe similar to what Japan is developing right now. If the robe degraded with battle damage then that would have been another…

Kind-of on topic: a very cool music video with the song written about Deus Ex:

That implies that the words themselves don't matter, and that the key is just in the mind. If that were true, one would think that using actual English would make things easier, since then things wouldn't be dependent on a dead language that nobody knows.

Here, read this - it's an awesome fanfic that asks the same question. Somebody on IO9 pointed me to it a few weeks ago: [hpmor.com]

There are still COBOL programs running on old mainframes, unfortunately.

CO2 is not vital for life? Ok. I'm out.

If you ignore the larger geological record and believe the doctored numbers put out by climate change believers, sure.

That. Is. AWESOME! Yes, exactly what I wanted - a rational analysis of the irrational magical world. :-DDD

Yes, that's the sense that I got from my (extremely limited) exposure to HP. A tiny and somewhat stagnated world that doesn't explore all the potential and possibilities of the modern era.

Huh. Well, if the new HP stuff for this series is supposed to be set in the "new world" and "across the pond" then there better be some upgrades. I don't see what sounds like magical mafia or biker gang using Marquess of Queensberry rules of magical combat. They would go for bigger = better, and start paying…

Actually I didn't like the books - although I loved the idea.

In the books the programmer writes the spell down on a sequence of planks not connected to each other (because writing everything on a single plank or sheet of paper would immediately execute the program). So essentially it is an object that's enchanted - or a series of objects, where the invocation of the previous…

Looking at this I am curious - has anyone in the Harry Potter universe ever tried to create procedural magic? An automated magic-based system that would chain magical effects and operations to increase their speed and power, vastly improve flexibility of spell design and capabilities, and perhaps even weaponize magic?

Wait, didn't the creator of the show explicitly say that one of these worlds is real? I agree that vital information has passed in both directions, but somehow that's supposed to work out, I guess.

Well, I just re-watched Fringe from the beginning, and the first three seasons tied together pretty well. There were hints of everything from the very beginning, and it came out OK. The fourth season was really iffy, but that's over now. Hopefully in the next season we will spend the majority of our time in 2036…

Very slim pickings. There is nothing on this list that I am really looking forward to. :-( I will try a couple of these shows, but the majority sound very iffy and forgettable.

Bah - just have her sell insurance and help out the FBI on special cases. That would be much more fun.

1. Human impact on global warming is indeed not a 100% slam-dunk. I would judge it to be a 90% slam-dunk. Because the graphs and calculations match up pretty well with mankind's carbon emissions. Of course correlation != causation, but it's strongly indicative of it. We have the highest carbon levels in hundreds…