Yup I second this. There are several top quality fantasy mmorpgs now available on free to play (read pay as you go) models. Lotro is good, as is Dungeons and Dragons online, Age of Conan or Everquest 2 are also available. Runes of magic also has it followers but it is generally considered a tier below the four games I have mentioned.

They are forcing an 11 year old to drive at almost twice the speed of sound. The monsters!!!

A lot of the science of the paper is above me but my reading of it is that the research strongly supports the idea that violent games increase violent tendencies but it's just that if a criminal spends all day playing Modern Warfare he won't have time to go robbing banks.

In Fox News terms we are creating a nation of violent psychopaths but as long as they don't come out of Mom's basement we should be OK.

If you add up all the money that goes through Paypal on a daily basis they must rank as one of the world's biggest financial institutions? I wonder if they are subject to any financial regulation?

and Netscape Navigator.

IE7 and FF 3.5 are hardly ancient history.

While Pariser's argument is quite convincing I have another reason for disliking smart filters. Whether we are talking about website search or smart command menus the algorithms seem determined to show me the results I am most likely to use based on historical usage. The trouble is these are the websites, commands, menus whatever that I already know exactly how to find BECAUSE I USE THEM EVERY DAY. If google went out of business tomorrow I would still be able to find Slashdot and all the other sites that I use regularly. I don't need a search tool to tell me about these. The real value of search is in finding the stuff I don't use very often and am therefore unlikely to find by myself. Smart filters hide the very results I need search to find.

I know I may have sneered at "Think of the Children Arguments" in the past but I loathe Facebook and all it stands for so I am ready to compromise my principles in order to help ferment an unstoppable outpouring of public outrage against it.

I absolutely loved it. The magic combinations are a complete hoot. Watch Total Biscuits play through on Youtube for a good aided of what the game entails.

I feel sorry for those folks who couldn't get it to run but I really do believe Magicka is an important gaming milestone.

I recently switched back to Firefox on my desktop and love it but when I tried Firefox for Android on my phone is was as slow as molasses. You can actually watch the page rendering in pixelated real time. Will the linux optimisations carry over I wonder?

I am a long time PC Gamer and currently in state of intoxication over the amount of gaming goodness I can get on the platform these days for buttons. I can get so much high quality gaming for $5 and $10 that Angry Birds for a dollar seems like the rip off to me.

Perhaps it is impossible to cover the cost of a traditional AAA game by selling it at such a low price but the market is moving on towards dramatically lower prices whether the publishers like it or not. Maybe increased sales will help compensate for lower prices. Digital distribution surely saves some cash as well.

I don't think you are correct to assume that uranium reserves will outlast oil reserves.

Known oil reserves dwarf the energy content of known Uranium reserves. The World Energy Council's survey of World energy is a good source for this. Of course we are using far more oil than we are uranium at present. My back of envelope calculation from WEC data suggest crude oil will run out in about 40 years while Uranium could last 80 at current rates of production. However given how slowly we are moving away from oil I think it is inevitable that non-conventional oil reserves will be exploited (shale / tar sands etc) and that could give us another century of oil.

In any case regardless of what happens to oil I don't think uranium will be an option in 50 years time.

I'll probably get modded down for this but I can't help it. I am in a giddy mood today.

because my better half is afraid of spiders. As soon as I pull one of those 8 legged creatures out I will be sleeping on my own.

I know where they are coming from but I have no idea how they can turn this into a patent.

Fixed it for you