Which is almost long enough for the next one to come out. Any year now they'll finish Episode 3 Forever...

I'm even luckier and picked up a 750 back when they first came out and Micro Center was selling them for $150-160 for a few weeks. Ridiculously good deal at that price (supposedly they were $196 in lots of 1000 at the time, so they must've been losing a bunch of money selling them that cheap...), but it's slowly been going up since then, unfortunately, especially after the rest of the i5/i3 lines came out.

Where's +1 Crotchety when you need it?

That seems a bit unlikely unless all the Blu-rays that sell for $10-15 as their normal price (i.e. not discounted during a special sale or something) are being sold below cost for some reason, and considering how they like making money, I'm not so sure they'd be doing that on such a large scale. I would not be at all surprised to find that it still costs noticeably more to produce them than the equivalent DVD, but not remotely near $10 more. I also would not be at all surprised to find that they make more money off the BDs that inexplicably list for $25-30+ (when others of similar popularity released at the same time with similar features cost half as much) than off anything else.

While it's true that they won't carry the games, I'm pretty sure that would only affect PCs, because last I heard none of the console manufacturers would license AO games in the first place/allow them to be released on their platforms.

And that really is a pretty big "if". The vast majority of people with seizure disorders are unaffected by flashing lights. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I think the number who are is in the low single digit percents. And then even among those who are, different people are more or less sensitive and respond differently to different frequencies of flashing/strobing. I'm one of those lucky winners who's epileptic and has photosensitive seizures, and while some things cause problems (Times Square was a nightmare before I was properly medicated), I've never in my life had any reaction to any TV/monitor/projector/fluorescent lights/etc., aside from the usual headache most people would get using an interlaced CRT at 45 Hz (had one at work back in the day, and I don't think even any normal people could look at it without getting irritated). Some other people do, though. Anyway, point being that people with seizure disorders are a small subset of the population, and people who have photosensitive seizures are a small subset of that group, and people who have them triggered by any given frequency is a subset of that group, so it's not terribly likely, even though it does happen and can kind of suck when it does.

Aside from adding that, though, it's nice to see posts from someone about that where they actually know what they're talking about for a change, instead of the usual confused stereotypes, and in a way that people can easily understand and will hopefully learn something from. Only thing I'd really consider changing is that grand/petit mal are kind of going out of favor as terms these days, because they're a bit out of date and not as useful for categorizing things these days now that more is known how they work. Now they're tonic-clonic and absence seizures, both of which are generalized (i.e. involve the entire brain), and neither of which is actually all that common. Partial seizures (which have a focal point in a much smaller part of the brain and can be either simple or complex, depending on whether consciousness/awareness/memory is affected) are more common. Of course, now they're working to change those terms to split things up and rearrange them some more, too, but that's the current state of things. On the off chance anyone even reads this and is curious, I guess. Heh.

It's probably more accurate to say "and" instead of "with" (which is where the ampersand came from; if you look at it, you can sort of see how it came from smooshing an e and t together, and you'll occasionally see "&c" as an abbreviation for "et cetera", usually in older documents), but yeah, that's a good distinction to at least be aware of (and which I sadly forget about and am not in the habit of using "et al." consistently).

It may be trivial, but it's still enough of an inconvenience that over the past year or two I've moved heavily away from using my Wii much to using my gaming/media center PC instead. They're hooked up to the same screen and speakers, so it's not like one is more accessible than the other. It's just that when I want to goof off for a bit with a game or movie or TV show, it's much easier to be able to get to it with a couple clicks than to have to go to the other side of the room, find the disc I want, and wait for the Wii to boot up and get through half a dozen warning screens about how we're all going to die if I don't read the safety information and wear my wrist strap.

It's not a horrible inconvenience, and I still use the Wii when there's something specific I want to do with it, but the PC offers much less "resistance", so it gets a lot more use these days both when I could do the same thing on either it or the Wii or when I'm looking for something to entertain myself with but am not sure yet what I have in mind and want to look at my options. The Wii would probably see more use if I could install everything and run without swapping discs (without having to mod it first) and it didn't have to basically reboot every time I go back to the main menu to switch tasks.

That same sort of thing does happen in limited parts of the US (mostly the northeast, which is older and denser, since larger amounts of the cities predate cars). I live in Boston, which is relatively compact, and you're likely to run into all sorts of people on the subway. Even more so in New York, and to some extent a few other places like Chicago.

On the other hand, I also have family in Detroit and Cleveland, and since I don't drive, I basically end up unable to leave the house and do anything without waiting for someone else to get a ride with them. Everything is enormously spread out, public transportation is nearly nonexistent, and most people wouldn't be caught dead on it if they had the choice.

Kind of a weird contrast. Not surprisingly, given my lack of driving, I prefer European-style cities (whether actually in Europe or not) to the newer car-based US type.

While I do agree with some parts of your post, this isn't quite accurate. Apple was refusing to let them sell anything for a different price from $0.99, i.e. they also refused to let them sell songs for more than that. They were enforcing constant, non-variable pricing for all songs, not a lower limit. At the same time, places like Wal-Mart had already been selling the same songs for $0.89 for a while already.

And as an added bonus, the 360 version has plenty of framerate issues on top of that. It's the very, very rare example (only one I can think of, actually) of a Squeenix game that runs better in the "crappy" PC port than the console version, which was unexpected considering their long and glorious history of atrocious PC ports (even Gyromancer, which is newer than TLR, is totally borked on the PC).

Except last time I checked, you could just pirate the DLC for the EA games, too, and if you do that you don't have to go through the hassle of creating an EA account and going through the clusterfuck that is trying to tie your EA and BioWare accounts together (and potentially Steam, too). Still ends up being less painful to just download it for free, at least for the single-player games they've been doing that with lately, like DA:O and ME2. I'm holding out in the hope that there'll eventually be some edition of them released in a year or two that I can buy with all the DLC and everything included that doesn't require me to go through all that crap, but the more time passes and the more stories I see about things like this, the less hopeful I am.

Just for the hell of it, I tried both on an ancient iMac, with all of a 500 MHz G3 in it and the latest Safari. They were both about the same speed: Flash was just over 2 fps, and HTML5 was just under 2 fps. I actually expected a lot worse. The Flash one scales to fit my relatively small window (the screen can only do 1024x768, after all), but the HTML5 one has scrollbars. No idea how/if that affects it, but I've seen stranger things make a noticeable difference. Also, the Flash one stutters and drops a lot in speed temporarily if I click on it, while the HTML5 one doesn't seem to mind at all. Considering other people are getting 10 fps with multi-core CPUs (even a single core of which is dramatically faster for just about anything than this is) I'm amazed this thing can pull off 2 fps. It can't even handle the low-res/low-quality videos on YouTube without choking and dying miserably.

There are a bunch of other games similar to those, too. However, they're all turn-based strategy, not RTS like he was talking about. While I and plenty of other people like those, there are a lot of people who don't like anything turn-based and think it's too slow and doesn't have enough action.

Look at benchmarks (preferably from multiple sources), particularly of things you actually tend to use the CPU for? There are plenty of people out there who've already figured out how whichever CPUs you're considering compare to each other for <insert purpose here>, whether it's compiling code, playing games, encoding video, running simulations, or whatever else. Works for me. This past fall, I found a few different ones in the price/performance range I was looking for, then poked around on places like Slickdeals to see if any of them were on sale, and now I have a shiny new CPU that I've been quite happy with.

Totally coincidentally, it involved me switching from AMD to Intel (and then a month or two later, my video card from Nvidia to ATI/AMD), because they happened to have what I wanted at the price I could afford at the time.