In the glory days of IRC, everyone was using it. Now most social medias have replaced the need for it. I think that what really killed IRC was msn/icq, specialised and targeted chat instead of meeting random people (which is quite hard to do these days).
IRC was the precursor to many specific stuff that later gave whole industries. Stuff like online dating didn't exist, interest groups like #linux or regional chatrooms like #Montreal. I think that jabber rose during the fall of IRC but they didn't manage to catch the fleeing users since their service is quite similar to what people were leaving. Since the web caught on online dating and such, IRC and jabber became less and less interesting for most of their former users.
I think that the major point here is that you consider Duke Nukem 3D to be a "standard FPS". You have to understand the 1996 context in which it was released. Prior to that, the "best and most advanced" FPS was Doom. There was no "real 3D", whole maps where flat. You could never stack monsters and players and items over a Z axis.
Duke Nukem 3D brought the 3D into FPS. Because of this 3D, aiming with the mouse became the standard for generations of games. A few months later ID Software published Quake, which was also mind bending. I don't feel like FPS have evolved at all since that time. Better story lines, more guns and spells, more details in the physics engines, but the 3D is still the same for the vast majority of large studio productions.
This is why Duke Nukem is so mythical (and Quake 1), it set the foundation for modern FPS games. Over the time, people forgot about their 1996 experience but where kept on the bandwagon by "Duke Nukem Forever in the following year".
Now I'll agree that the probability that this game lives up its expectations tends toward zero but hey, its like a software game soap opera going on!
In Montreal there are a lot of buried cables. I worked in a research facility for the only power company around and they pointed out several problems for this method. It costs a fortune so its not really applicable for very long distances. Also, whenever there is a failure you have to reel a few kilometers of cables, fix them and rewire everything in a tube full of mud, water and who knows what. During autumn the water in the tube freezes and expands causing stress and fissures.
It was discussed extensively since we had a massive power outage in 1998 caused by icing rain that affected about 3 millions for 3 weeks.
So burying cables might work well in a city for a while but I really don't think its any silver bullet.
You need a stereo headset to listen to this. There is a frequency in one ear and another one slightly off in the second ear. Your brain then merge the two sine waves and intepret both as a single, low frequency "beat" of the difference.
I have trouble looking at the data (not a bug, more like usability). There are huge sections of the chart without relevant information, just long curved lines. This causes me to scroll horizontaly/verticaly with a little lag until I find interesting text. Maybe something more compact would do the trick without ruining the layout.
No one has mentionned price yet. Tablet PCs usually sell over 2000$, that's a lot of money for a "cool gadget". That is why netbooks are selling like hot pancakes, you pay only a few hundred bucks for a low power device. The gab between the iPad and the Tablet PC prices is so huge that no technology seems to be able to justify it.