If you don't like it, don't play it.

Well, but those of us who played older versions of these games and realized that they were broken in certain ways are disappointed to see that they won't be getting any more "patches," so to speak, to their favorite edition of the game.

It's like being a huge Battlefield:Vietnam fan, and then Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142 come out. You like BF:V, and don't like BF2142, and so you don't buy or play BF2142--but it does mean that you're stuck with the BF:V gameplay that you have, rather than getting fixes or updates that the game might sorely need. And it still means that you're disappointed that they took the games in a direction that you don't like. Not playing the new game doesn't really remove the disappointment, and it does make it tough to find new people to play the old game with. Naturally, this makes a person want to complain--it's perfectly natural, and it's just as natural to dislike complainers, which is why this "don't like don't play" attitude is to some extent understandable.

From everything that I've heard about 4th edition--honestly, it's not much--it's been compared to the "WoW" of D&D. The game at least pretended, at one time, to be about role-playing--which is why your character stats were generated randomly in the default system. The statistical distillation of the game mechanics, though, inevitably resulted in the same kind of treatment happening to D&D as happens to every other game out there--people thoroughly and empirically evaluate every practical combination of weapons and skills and items that they can think of, and then everyone plays with the most efficient ones. For an MMO, where the player is in a battle with the developers to minimize the time commitment (whereas the developers have a vested interest in maximizing the time it takes to do everything), it makes a sad kind of sense. For a game that is nominally about telling a story with rules, it really runs contrary to the spirit of the game.

But, honestly, if that's how people _want_ to play these games, it's really not for me to tell them how to do so. Admittedly, newer CRPGs do include content that really forces you to build the most effective characters possible if you want to experience everything the game has to offer. Beyond that, since a multiplayer CRPG really doesn't have the same GM-player dynamic as a tabletop D&D game, it's really not possible to "correctly" role-play a fighter with a strength of ten--you just end up getting killed in combat and unable to pass any of the rigidly-defined skill checks. This prevents you from making fun progress in the game, whereas in a tabletop even failure should give you an opportunity to role-play something fun, if the GM and the players are imaginative enough to do it.

Actually, that's exactly what I figured they would do: move the magnet or the device in and out of the permanent field, or around inside a gradient field, or something. But then you would have to power the device that moves the magnet, and you're not going to get enough power out of the device to do that, or else you're violating the laws of thermodynamics. So, since you have to power a motor or a piezoelectric transducer, I'm not really sure what application this device has that couldn't be better served by whatever's powering the motor.

Reserved slots--or, really, the way the server browser handles them.

I don't actually have a problem with reserved slots themselves. They have no value to me, and I've never been kicked out because someone else who had a reserved slot joined. My problem is that the server browser doesn't understand reserved slots, and shows servers whose "public" slots are full as having free space to join. Steam has a rather good server browser that refreshes quickly and has other nice features, but joining servers only to go through the entire motions of connecting and _then_ being told that I can't play because there isn't actually a slot for me is annoying. It also breaks the functionality that auto-retires full servers, which is a very nice feature.

Maybe it's a pet peeve of mine. On one other site I go to once in a while, pretty much everybody complained about getting into this kind of server once in a while--one of the ones that reports being full but is actually empty. I haven't once ever had that particular problem. It's a strange situation.

Spintronics is a little too far out of my ken (I was always more of a radiation physicist, where everything comes in nice little packages instead of fields), but if I'm reading the paper correctly, they're saying that they can apply a static magnetic field to one of these devices and then can measure a voltage drop across a resistor hooked up to the device. They can get a few millivolts from a 1.2 Tesla field, which persists for at least ten minutes but does decay in that time frame. When they remove the magnetic field, the voltage disappears.

I guess my question is that if the field is static, where is the energy coming from that drives the current giving rise to the voltage? I'm also wondering how one regenerates the voltage after it discharges completely.

In this day and age, if Nokia really is that important of a part of the country's economy, the lawmakers could probably get away with calling them economic terrorists.

That ship sailed days ago. I really would consider actually buying the stupid mini-expansion and giving Bethesda more money--even though I very recently was certain I wouldn't even purchase FO3--if I didn't have to jump through their lousy software hoop.

I bought into EA's worthless content delivery system for the BF2142 expansion. That ended up taking me for the biggest ride of my gaming life. I don't really want to go through that kind of trash again, and I don't like supporting badly-implemented content delivery systems.

My question is how I'm supposed to purchase it without Live.

It's really a flaw with the engine that Oblivion and Fallout share. It was also a problem in Morrowind to a degree. That kind of narrative consistency is not something that Bethesda's latest games do well--even if you ignore the 72-hour-refresh. It is very immersion breaking, but it's not a surprise that it's happening.