Right.... If Batman can do it, why not Officer Murphy?

checking your account every few days is only prudent.

Not unless you're unemployed and therefore have a lot of extra time on your hands...

Honestly, if I have to watch my bank account like a hawk to have a debit or credit card, I'd stick to cash exclusively, and the good old monthly statement... I don't know about anyone else, but the "convenience" of a credit/debit card is pretty damn small to me.

When I read the headline I was certain it was referring to the time required to complete a single game of Civilization. I just concluded a single-player civ4 game on standard speed and spent around that amount of play time. It's certainly a change of pace from games like Starcraft where 2 hours is epically long.

Trébuchet

Yes, and I think this makes the point. From a corporation's point of view there was never any guarantee that an artificial meat product would be welcomed, since so many PETA-types would object on basically irrational grounds. This was a barrier to commercialization, since manufacturers didn't know if the product would be rejected by PETA even if it did substantially decrease cruelty to animals. To pre-empt this, PETA basically had to go to war with itself, making it clear that they /had/ considered the issue and the consensus was that artificial meat would be welcomed. It wasn't unanimous, but it's much better for PETA to fight this out /before/ a product is developed rather than after.

Except active virus scanning destroys computer performance.

That would make a nice sample image for the "Gallery of Wrong" in this article.

I personally feel that the only system I have seen so far with a reasonable rate of success is dedicated servers with some sort of permaban of accounts caught cheating. While by no means a perfect system; my personal experience (with TF2 as that is the only FPS game besides MW2 I have played over the last few years) was that I found a gaming site that ran servers for a variety of games. An extended group of people frequented those servers, creating a community of sorts, and I personally never had much problems with cheaters (that I can recall). Either they were banned/kicked swiftly and effectively, or they never logged on that particular set of servers; or possible a combination of the two. Though it should be mentioned that over the last two weeks, or so, of playing Modern Warfare 2 I haven't really seen a lot of players that I could confidently claim were cheating; though I have seen a few that were ridiculously good. Perhaps that is just me not really paying attention.

Cheating or no cheating, sales or no sales, I personally feel that despite Modern Warfare 2 being a really great game at its core, I won't be playing much more than I have; as it really feels impersonal when all the other players are random. And there is no forum for me to hang around talking some trash between matches and evenings. This of course isn't helped by the fact that Iwnet seem to have about a 30% (number I pulled out of my behind but it is how I have experienced it so far) failrate; disconnects, game closings, kicked from a lobby before you have connected to it, random ping, and people leaving games because a map comes up that they don't want to play (Highrise and Estate seem to see half the "group" leave when they come into rotation) leading to lobby's closing most of the time.

Well, it all started in 1962... Utilizing advances in modern food synthesis, scientists at NASA began work on a germ hostile space meat to be used into long expeditions in deep space! Only recently has their hard work paid off. As even more advances in the field of space meat have been made and applied to what is now known as operation meat. Seeing this as a way to end their streak of being sued by angry costumers poisoned by their burgers, the Mac Meaties corporation decided to try this miraculous space meat. Not having access to that technology, we make ours out of napkins.

Not very good. It drains really fast even when casually browsing the web (aggressive power profiles enabled.) Nowhere near the 3 hours claimed by Windows when the battery is fully charged..

Just wait til you find out how this 'internet' thing works!

We use the same naming convention here, and, as a result, all the servers now have nicknames

It depends on the OS in question, and the differences to the previous version, and if they're significant enough to warrant parting with your cash.

The same as buying a new anything, really.

surely we should all be changing our passwords back to "Joshua"?

How big are YOUR hands then?
Mine are only large enough to hold one, perhaps two boards at a time