If this is just a game, how can we tell who the NPCs are?

What happened to P2P?
The job bittorrent was made for, seems to have been replaced by a bunch of rubbishy web-based services.

Robust, distributed protocols -> Web based junk -> Web based junk: Sign in using facebook ID -> iPhone app -> ???

This is textbook propaganda. All governments do it.

Doublespeak, newspeak, thought-terminating cliches, loaded language and weasel words.
Bonus points if you can shoehorn all that it into a backronym.

Before I drive, I use prescient route planning, induced by consuming the spice Melange.

Not always.

Access points use the SSID as the salt, and most APs use common default SSIDs.

Charecter set ^ password length = permutations.
You're right with exponential growth.

Just remember that if your password has password dictionary fragments, including all common substitutions, then the length is the number of fragments, not the number of characters.

If you use a 63 character, full ascii key, which is quite realistic since this is a key, not a password, then the time quickly rises to galactic scales.

Crisis averted.

They will give the AI a heavy Indian accent, because it's what callers expect.

PCI slots dried up. My latest mobo has just the one.
However PCIe devices, except graphics cards, just aren't there in terms of availability and choice.

In the mean time, everything moved onto the motherboard, so you hardly need any expansion cards.

These new social networks, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology.
But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment.
The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop.
As usual, the incumbent was to be turned out by the faddy start-up, who would then become the incumbent;
but this time, by conscious strategy, facebook would be able to maintain its position permanently.

I knew somebody who blinked in around 95% of photos. Even a fake count-down didn't throw them off.

Apple have gone too far this time!
A cloud based Mac is going to implode immediately, and take all it's users with it.

Most DDR2-era motherboards have solid-state tantalum capacitors.

This only covers email spam. I'm guessing facebook and twitter users get spammed quite a bit to their profiles, as these are used more and more for daily communication.

When will this recession end, and we can get back to building custom-made luxury planets.