I think what people mean is that daytrading has much in common with gambling. And there are a lot of gamblers. One of them is bound to win the lottery at some point, thanks to pure chance and luck. The difference is, if you win at the stock market, people think you are smart, and write articles about you.

I tend to see it both ways. If you are smart and know what you're doing, you can give your luck some nudges in the right direction, but you will still need to be lucky to succeed.

I have been a Warcraft fan from day one, when my small, young and eager hands got hold of a copy of Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. Back then I didn't have so many games to choose from, so I guess I played it at least three times (Demon/Water Elemental spam 4 teh win!). Warcraft 2 I played at least two times, and Warcraft 3 three times again.

Yet I never touched World of Warcraft, at all. I was intrigued at first, but when I started hearing about how the MMO mechanics work, my interest faded fast. I much prefer enjoying a tailored single player experience to the streamlined multiplayer questgrinding typical of MMOs. Also I like to play games in my own sweet time and not have to make appointments or reserve a regular time slot for that. This creates a pressure to play, which completely sucks out the fun for me.
Also, I don't like how MMO's "feel". Recently I tried the Elder Scrolls Online Beta, and movement and combat in it is so "floaty", it makes everything feel fake. You can walk through NPC's and most of the items and objects in the world are static, as if glued in place. In single player Skyrim dishing out and receiving blows actually feels physical, NPC's get in your way, items can be moved around... the game experience is just vastly superior.

The only MMO I spent some considerable time with was The Old Republic, because I heard that you can essentially play it as a single player game and that it has a very good plot. Both of these are true, but the technical shortcomings of being an MMO persist. I also don't like the monthly subscription model. I wish companies would charge me for the amount of time I actually play. Sometimes I can only play a game for a couple of days a month, because I'm on business trips or have other assignments. Then the subscription I just bought is almost wasted, discouraging me from buying the next.

I guess MMO's are not ready for me yet

It may be Chinese law, but at the same time, isn't it protectionism? Some Chinese search engines out there will certainly be profiting from the Google ban, where as Google is being blocked from doing business in China.

Why isn't there a lawsuit against this practice? No complaint in the WTO (where China is member)? In the age of information technology, censorship and free market don't really work with each other.

Well, let me tell you that this does not mean global warming isn't happening, and in fact, it makes perfect sense that this should be happening.
When you have ice breaking off due to global warming, that ice will slide off its base and drift into the ocean, thereby increasing the water surface that is covered with ice.

Microsoft
Minecraft

Both start with MI and end in FT. Both are 9 characters long. Further lexical analysis shows that the mismatched infix "croso" and "necra" strings contain the common substring "cr", leaving "oso" and "nea" after the 2nd reduction. Osonea will be the next game developed by Mojang under Microsofts stewardship. It will make 2.5 billion dollars. Earning Microsoft immediate return on investment of 25%.
qed

Given 2 billion dollars for Mojang, I would have sold. No question about it.

But it does make Notch's indignant reaction to Facebook buying out Occulus look even sillier now.

Maybe the companies you've worked for sucked. I always book 40 hour weeks, because I can't be bothered to keep exact record of when I arrived at work, when I left for lunch, when I returned from lunch, and when I went home. Most of the time during normal operation I work less, closer to 7h than 8h days. But when necessity demands it, I've worked 12h days for weeks, and still only booked 40h at the end of the week. The important thing to me is getting the job done, and I consider the money I receive by booking 40h the cost to have me do that, whether it actually takes more or less time is irrelevant.
On average, I think I work less than the 40h weeks I always book. But I do my job well, I have a reputation, and nobody questions me.
I think it's more honest. I want to be payed for the quality of my work and not for the time I hang around in an office. It would be easy to hang around until the hours sum up, but I would be wasting my time and fooling my employer into thinking I'm actually doing something during that time. Sometimes I've completed the task for the day in 6 hours of concentrated work, and I'm not in the mood or mind to start something new. I pack my things and leave.
Nobody has ever raised an issue with my work hours so far, probably because I'm very good at what I do. And if somebody ever did, I'd probably get a new job. I don't want to compromise on how I do my job, and if I go, it's mostly their loss, not mine.

Thanks for one of those rare, massively informative and to the point posts.

If you consider that zero-g is an environment that is utterly alien to us, which we have zero adaptation for, I'm actually surprised how relatively well homo sapiens is able to cope with it.

If you compare it to other alien environments, like too much or too little pressure, too much or too little Oxygen, too cold or too hot... usually these great differences from our natural environment are very quick to kill us.

The satellites were brought up by Russian Soyuz rockets.

I'm sure this mishap has nothing to do with EU sanctions against Russia and the crisis in the Ukraine.

September has 30 days.
So that "immediately prior" to October 1st, should probably be September 30th.
Not September 29th.
Just sayin.

That's what I was thinking. Some bugs are practically impossible to avoid, because it is almost impossible for a single programmer to have the entirety of a software system in his head, with all possible cases and side effects. Without complete knowledge of a system it's impossible to know the perfect solutions.
At some point it's up to testing and quality control to take responsibility and weight off the programmers shoulders.

Are you sure we are talking about the same game when we speak HL2?

Wow. Do you play all your games like that? You must have raced through the game, blasting everything in your path. I realize that official speedruns of HL2 are probably way faster than 3hrs, but it still must have been a hectic run through the game.

I like to be sneaky, explore the environments, enjoy the views, smell the roses and listen to the stuff the NPC's have to say before moving on.

HL2 is true to its name. It took me about 16 hours to complete HL2. About 8h to complete Episode 1, and about 4h to complete Episode 2.

It's like the difference between silently swearing at the idiot in the car right in front of you and honking in a traffic jam at some idiot a mile away.