the industrial capitalists just found new ways to put us (and now our wives too, who are no longer required for housework thanks to all these appliances) to work for their own insatiable greed

Whose greed? Speak to your parents or grandparents and find out what they had when growing up, or trying to raise a family. Having the husband work and wife stay at home meant few luxuries, and certainly not a big house with bedrooms for everyone, two cars, and plenty of disposable income for entertainment and eating out.

Part of the reason why more women are working these days is because families want and expect to have nice things and a high standard of living. The labour saving devices have indeed made life simpler and less work-intensive, and if people were happy to live simply the 'age of new enlightenment' would be here.

But technology has also offered other opportunities, including making impressive things look affordable, and wanting to take advantage of the new technology, as well as wanting to keep up with the Joneses, has pushed more of us in to wanting to earn a living.

Does she want a philosophical discussion about open v. proprietary? No. It's just got to work.

Right. I agree entirely that she doesn't want that discussion, but that is pretty much the point. Unless and until the average user is educated about the implications of open vs. proprietary software we will continue to suffer the chains of proprietary software.

I believe this is Stallman's entire argument, one that he believes has already shaped much of the past two decades by the insistence of having access to open software.

Super Mario Brothers was improved by its release as part of Super Mario All Stars.

No it wasn't. The graphics were better, I'll admit that, but the control system was also tweaked, resulting in lower inertia for Mario and making a lot of the fluid gameplay either less challenging or too difficult to replicate from the original. Changing direction in mid-jump was less challenging, giving greater options to avoid enemies. But the timings of jumps and turns relied on the higher-inertia Mario, and changing this made the classic tactics obsolete.

Even the improved graphics affected gameplay. The parallax introduced between the foreground and background may have been a cosmetic improvement, but it inadvertently revealed blocks in the later worlds that were originally hidden by the similar-looking background palette. Those hidden blocks could foil jumps if you didn't know they were there, but by being obvious in the remake they were made redundant.

Super Mario All-stars was a good idea, but it shows that making a prettier game doesn't translate in to a better game, nor indeed a faithful reproduction of the earlier game. I'll always return to the original for my SMB fix.

My understanding of Godwin's law is not that referencing Nazis is bad (after all, they were a part of history). He just observed that eventually, if a fight goes on long enough, someone will make reference to them. He did not opine if that was bad or good.

I believe the idea was that once Nazis are mentioned in an argument there will be no more useful information imparted. Invoking Godwin's Law is bad from the point of view of having a reasoned argument, but good in that any sane people involved can recognise quickly what is happening and move on.

Godwin's Law also doesn't apply when actually discussing Nazis, only when a comparison is unduly made to Nazis or Hitler.

I have to agree that Smith is a good actor. But I still voted for that option. I see it as more a request to stop replacing story with celebrity, because too many times it seems that films are sold based primarily on who is the star.

Not a perfect driver, but I'll compare my record with nearly every bicyclist I've ever seen on the road

Maybe you're only comparing your record to cyclists you've noticed. The ones acting like idiots tend to leave an impression, much like the car-driving idiots.

"Importantly, it won't require the hardware upgrades that Vista demanded, partially because the hardware has caught up"

So the new OS won't need hardware upgrades because the hardware was already upgraded for the previous OS? That's some twisted logic.

Just to give a real world comparison, in most places it'd be perfectly legal for me to sit on my front porch and cuss out everyone who happens to walk down the street.

Yeah, you'd be annoying, but it's not a particularly relevant real-world example. The researcher was in a specific PvP zone that was designed for two opposing sides to get together and battle.

It seems to me that a better real-world example would be if a boxing ring were set-up in a gym with notices and warnings stating that anyone who steps in to the ring can be boxed by anyone else in the ring. It may be that after time familiar faces end up creating a social group in the boxing ring and spend their time chatting, but they really cannot complain if someone new comes along and starts boxing them.

The refusal on the part of LucasFilm to do a new, anamorphic transfer of the original editions makes the version that's included on those DVDs not worth buying.

That's what I thought too, until I bought and watched them.

It's true that the transfer is rubbish, but they are the theatrical releases of the films! It really doesn't matter that there are video artefacts everywhere and the sound isn't 5.1, because I am watching the films as I remember them, with no background slapstick or out-of-place CGI characters to distract me.

It is how I remember Star Wars to be, and that is the important point.

That's true, but I don't think his point was that Naxxramas wasn't new content to most people and more that it was old content that was tweaked, showing that there was little 80th level content created specifically for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

From that point of view, it may well be that the creative energies have been diverted away from World of Warcraft to different projects and the life of the game may now be quite limited.

Rather than fighting other players for spawns you could have teamed-up with them to complete the goal cooperatively, an essential part of what makes the game appealing.

You also make it sound like combat never changes, which suggests you didn't train new abilities as you gained levels. Combat is quite simplistic at lower levels because, as you say, the game is training you. When you progress you get stronger and more diverse abilities that lead to more subtle combinations of attacks.

But, really, don't look at other players as the enemy, but allies to be made for now and for the future.

The crew of Red Dwarf were killed in a radiation leak whilst Lister was in stasis as a punishment. To protect Lister the ship's computer, Holly, kept him in stasis and piloted Red Dwarf out of the solar system so that the irradiated ship would not cause a threat to Earth or anyone who might come looking for them.

It took 3 million years for the radiation to drop to a safe level, after which Holly revived Lister, which is why it is assumed the Lister is the last human alive. Red Dwarf had been travelling away from Earth for those 3 million years, which is why it would take so long to get back.